Summon the Lambs to Slaughter
by La Guera
Summary: When a bizarre transfer student comes to Hogwarts, Snape pushes her to the breaking point. But when he's accused of a crime he never committed, she is the only one who can prove his innocence.
1. The Coming of a Stranger

1

     If anyone had bothered to look closely at the old woman sitting primly on the bench between platforms nine and ten at King's Cross Station, they might have noticed several peculiarities.  They might have noticed that she was wearing mismatched socks, one blue and one red, or that she was wearing men's loafers.  They might have noticed that she had been reading the same page of the paper for the past three quarters of an hour.  They might even have noticed a curious hunted look in her eyes.  But no one did bother to look closely at the old woman sitting alone on the bench.  Most were too busy to even glance at her at all, and those that did merely deemed her a lonely old widow, perhaps an absent-minded grandmother waiting for her grandchildren.

     Professor Minerva McGonagall's mind was indeed elsewhere at the moment, but she was not absent-minded.  She was nervous.  She was out of her element, and she was wise enough to know it.  Only the gravity of the task set before her kept her from fleeing the station and returning to Hogwarts.  She didn't belong here in the Muggle world.  The few other times she had ventured into it, she had been safely concealed beneath the guise of an innocuous grey tabby cat.  Here in her human form, she felt exposed, vulnerable.  She shifted uncomfortably on the bench.

     She stared down at the Muggle newspaper for the hundredth time.  The same grainy picture of a narrow-faced man in a pinstriped suit stared back at her.  She sniffed.  Muggle papers were so boring.  No one ever moved.  Just the same old people in the same old poses hour after hour.  She didn't see how they could stand it.  She closed the paper with a slap, grimacing at the unsightly smudges of black ink on her thumbs.  She wiped them on the hem of her conservative black skirt.

     Not for the first time, she found herself wishing that Dumbledore had sent someone else instead.  Hagrid, for instance, but the headmaster had insisted that she go.  "You're her head of House, Minerva, you should be the one to collect her.  Besides, someone like Hagrid would be a bit conspicuous trying to slip through the barrier, don't you think?" he had told her in his implacably cheery manner.  He was right, of course, as always.  So she had come.

     Privately, she though that this was one of his worse ideas, but private was all that thought would ever be.  She respected Albus Dumbledore, and she was not a person who gave respect easily.  Under his tenure, Hogwarts had flourished, becoming the most respected wizarding school in the world.  He, with the help of the famous Harry Potter, had repelled three attacks by Lord Voldemort before the fourth had finally succeeding in returning him to corporeal form.  She was not about to question his judgment.

     Still, she couldn't help but wonder.  A transfer student in these dangerous times?  One from the United States no less?  Yes, her biographical information had all proven correct according to the inquires made by Dumbledore and their few remaining contacts at the Ministry of Magic, but that proved nothing.  For all they knew, she could be a member of the burgeoning enclave of Death Eaters rumored to be in America.

     Yet Dumbledore had insisted.  He was adamant that the resurrection of Voldemort not hamper Hogwarts' efforts to provide students the finest wizarding education available.  No doubt he was sincere about this, but she also suspected that he had other, less altruistic reasons for bringing in outside students.  It was more than likely that he was hoping to gauge the preparedness of the American wizarding community should Voldemort decide to move against them.  He was also hoping to marshal critical allies for the inevitable war that loomed like a poisonous fume on the horizon.

     When pressed for information about this new student, the headmaster had been surprisingly secretive.  He would say only that she was a fifth-year named Rebecca Stanhope, and that she was a student from the inauspicious and largely unknown Disabled American Institute for Magical Studies, or D.A.I.M.S.  To this sparse information, he would euphemistically add only that she was a student with "special needs."  When pressed about the exact nature of these "needs," he only smiled with a knowing twinkle in his blue eyes and said, "You shall see soon enough."  No more could be gotten out of him on the subject.

     Snape had responded to the news with his usual candor.  "Not another bloody Harry Potter, I hope," he had muttered, and stalked from the room in his usual ill humor.  No one else had commented at all.

     McGonagall sighed and pushed her spectacles back onto the bridge of her nose.  A glance at the clock on the wall told her to was 8:45a.m., well before the ten o'clock departure time of the Hogwarts Express.  Albus had told her the extra time might be necessary to get the new student situated into her compartment without the unwanted gawking of the other students.  That remark had prompted her to wonder how bad the new student's condition could possibly be, but she hadn't felt it proper to ask at the time, and the ensuing flurry of preparations for the return of the students had wiped the question from her mind.

     To pass the time while awaiting the arrival of her newest charge, she watched the Muggles as they went about their daily lives.  They never ceased to amaze her.  Their ingenuity at surviving without magic was mind-boggling.  In a way, she envied their independence from magic, their ability to improvise and adapt to any given situation.  If by some bizarre happenstance, she were to lose her magical abilities, she would be hopelessly and utterly lost.  She could no more have driven a car or used a telephone than a Muggle could have Apparated or learned how to use the Floo network.  Magic was the only way of life she had ever known, and given a choice to remain in the magical world or live life as a Squib, she knew her choice would be made in a heartbeat.  For all her envy of the versatility of Muggles, she loved being a witch.

     She watched, face impassive, as a pudgy, ruddy-faced man wearing suspenders and a grey suit stopped a few feet in front of her, took out a small, wand-like device from the inside of his coat, and began pressing small buttons.  He held the gadget up to his ear, his salt-and-pepper handlebar mustache twitching impatiently.  He shifted his weight from foot to foot as he waited, the hand not holding the phone clutching a cheap vinyl briefcase.  After a pause, the man clicked his tongue and began shouting into the small piece of black plastic.

     "Weathers, goddammit, I told you to sell those ruddy stocks when they hit twenty-five and a quarter; now the blasted things have bottomed out at eleven.  You've cost me a fortune!  What in God's name were you doing, buggering your secretary?"  The man's face had gone a deep, ugly plum.

     The mention of stocks intrigued her.  The only stocks she knew of were the wicked, cruel metal and wooden devices used to punish and torment unlucky witches and wizards.  The Muggles had used them to great effect during the Great Persecutions.  What would this fellow be wanting with those?  They had long ago fallen into disuse, though she was fairly certain the Argus Filch, Hogwarts caretaker since time immemorial, had a few still tucked away in the labyrinthine basements that served as his storage rooms.

     Some of her perplexity must have shown on her face, because the man snapped his head in her direction, his face rigid with a contemptuous sneer.

     "And what might you be looking at, old mum?" he spat, clutching the black box in his hand so fiercely that the casing creaked.

     McGonagall, unprepared for such a confrontation, blinked in surprise.  "Mm?  I'm sorry, I was doing a bit of woolgathering."  She put on the pleasantest face possible when she spoke.  No need to antagonize the Muggles.  The last thing they needed was to have to call in the Ministry of Magic to Obliviate several hundred Muggles because she'd gotten in a row with an overwrought fellow with a cheap briefcase.

     "Right," he snarled.  "Got no life of your own, so you've taken to eavesdropping on the conversations of decent, hard-working folks like myself.  Nosy old biddy.  Well, you'll not be getting any juicy gossip out of me."  He stopped, huffing, bright black eyes daring her to contradict him.  Several heads had turned to watch the fracas brewing in their midst.

     "I most certainly was not," she huffed, drawing up her narrow shoulders in indignation.  "I'm simply waiting for my granddaughter."  The steady blue eyes that had cowed a generation of unruly pupils never wavered as she stared back at the man.

     The man looked her up and down, as though appraising a particularly decrepit nag.  "I find it hard to believe a dotty old bird like you was ever that fortunate," he snapped.  Then his roving eyes caught sight of her mismatched socks and incongruous shoes.  "You're a bloody nutter, that's what you are," he said, derisive incredulity in his voice. "Escaped from the loony loft, have you?"  

     He began backing away from her, eyes darting warily to and fro.  The communicating device in his hand was long forgotten.  He gazed raptly at her, clearly expecting her to fling herself upon him at any moment.  When she calmly reached down to scratch her knee, he gave voice to a hiccoughing screech of alarm and fled.

     McGonagall gazed after him in shock, wondering what had caused such an outburst.  Had she really dressed that inappropriately?  She hadn't thought so; she'd even gone so far as to ask Hagrid, who had far more dealings with the non-magical world, if she looked all right.  Though in retrospect, that might not have been so wise.  Hagrid did, after all, wear a musty moleskin overcoat the size of a camping tent and sport hair more matted and tangled than the Devil's Snare vines in Professor Sprout's greenhouses.  But she had specially ordered Muggle fashion magazines to help her prepare, and she had followed the picture models as best she could.

     She cast a quick glance down at herself.  Conservative, neatly pressed white blouse covering the upper torso.  Everything was as it should be there.  A look at her lower body told her she had not done something outlandish like putting the undergarments on the outside of her simple black skirt.  Nothing about her appearance should have raised any alarm, and indeed, the other people in the station who had been watching the strange proceedings had gone back to their business as soon as the fan man had fled down the terminal.

     _Maybe he was the dangerous lunatic,_ she thought, and smiled.  She returned to the same page of the paper that had held her attention all morning.

     When nine-thirty came and went with no sign of the new student, she felt the first stirrings of unease.  Things were not going according to plan.  More than a month past, the student had been sent an owl informing her that she was to meet Professor McGonagall between platforms nine and ten at precisely nine o'clock on the first of September.  The student had responded promptly, saying she would be prepared and ready as requested.  Yet she was not here.

     There was a myriad of reasons for the delay, many of them innocent, but she couldn't quite shake the feeling that something had gone amiss.  She supposed her fears were a byproduct of Lord Voldemort's return in the spring.  Since then, everything had changed.  The fear that had lain dormant since his sudden disappearance thirteen years before had returned, washing over everything like a polluted river.  Mundane mishaps that would otherwise have been laughed off or attributed to chance now took on ominous undertones.  The fearful whisperings had begun again in poorly lit taverns, murmurings of the demon that returned to haunt their dreams.  Free and easy movement was a thing of the past in their world.  Now everyone looked over their shoulder if they ventured out after sunset.

     The station began to fill rapidly with jostling bodies as commuters lined up to catch their respective trains.  Several Hogwarts students had arrived, shooting her curious glances as they passed.  A few called out a greeting, but when she did not acknowledge their raised hands or happy calls, they spared her a confused glance and trundled through the barrier, talking amongst themselves.  Seeing a Hogwarts teacher outside the school grounds was a rare event indeed.

     McGonagall's mind worked feverishly as she sorted through the various possibilities for the student's absence.  She started with the most likely reasons.  The student may have simply decided she no longer wanted to attend Hogwarts and canceled.  But then why hadn't they received an owl telling them such?  It was possible that she had decided not to go only this morning, in which case an owl wouldn't arrive for at least ten days.  It was also within the realm of possibility that the unreliable forms of Muggle transportation had held her up.

     Then she considered the darker possibility.  What if Voldemort had somehow learned of her arrival and had managed to intercept her before she could get to King's Cross?  At the apex of his power, Voldemort had allies in every tier of wizard society, from the barmaids all the way up to the pristine offices of the Ministry of Magic.  Why shouldn't it be so now?  If his underlings had infiltrated the Ministry, it would be a simple task to find out about the transfer student.  It was hardly classified information.

     _But why would Voldemort want to get his hands on a single transfer student from the United States?  Her last name doesn't ring any bells, doesn't speak to any of the great wizarding families, _she thought rubbing her hands together slowly.

     What was it Dumbledore had said?  _A student with special needs.  _Was that why Voldemort might be interested in her?  What were these needs exactly?  Did she possess some special, vital power that needed meticulous cultivation, the sort of which, only the fine minds assembled at Hogwarts could provide?  Could it be possible that she was another special child, a child like Harry Potter who would help bring about the ruin of Voldemort?  She doubted it.  Even with the self-imposed isolation of the American wizarding population from the rest of the world, there would have been _someone_ who would've passed the word along in the form of juicy rumor.

     _Special needs.  _The phrase lingered in her mind like the last remnant of a mostly forgotten poem.  She had the distinct feeling that the strangely haunting phrase was the key to the entire mystery.  She turned it over and over in her mind, nibbling at it with her formidable mind.  It yielded nothing.

     At nine forty-seven, just as she was about to forsake her post and return to Hogwarts, something caught her eye.  What looked like a small tank was rolling through the crowds, its four rubber wheels cutting a swath through the bodies in its path as people parted to avoid being struck.  Piloting this improbable contraption was a young girl of no more than fifteen.  One hand curled around a bizarre walking stick that seemed to propel the craft forward.  The other rested awkwardly on a pile of packages.  The topmost package looked suspiciously like a robe.  A Hogwarts robe.  The girl's eyes were upraised, looking at the numbered platform signs, and McGonagall suddenly knew that this was her student.

     All at once, the meaning of the mystical phrase "special needs" became clear, and she stifled a sigh of self-exasperation.  Of course.  She had been so stupid, wasting time and energy with her fanciful suppositions, when all the while the answer had been obvious right from the start.  She was a student from Disabled American Institute for Magical Studies.  It was only logical, therefore, that she suffer from some sort of catastrophic physical malady.  

     It was just that, well, she had expected something a bit less catastrophic.

     The girl had spotted her and begun steering purposefully in her direction, and as she approached, McGonagall could see more clearly the extent of her condition.  She was thin, hovering just about the point of emaciation, her thin shoulders rounded, as though they carried a great weight.  The bones of her arms jutted at odd angles, her forearms slightly off-center.  Long, thin fingers clutched jerkily around her parcels, flexing uncertainly, like blind worms.  From the fierce concentration on the girl's face, it was apparent that it took a great effort of will just to control them.  Two legs, thin as matchsticks poked out from beneath her skirt.  McGonagall was sure that if she so much as wrapped her fingers around the bony ankles, they would shatter into powder.

_     Her legs are no more than kindling, dry sticks and twine.  I could snap them with a flick of my wrist.  _The thought paralyzed her.  The sight of those pitiful, twisted, wasted legs was stupefying.

     "Professor McGonagall?"  The girl and her odd, one-man tank sat in front of her, and one small hand was outstretched in greeting.

     "Yes."  It was all she could do to make that simple reply.  Her mind was still reeling, her eyes still fixed on those improbable, gnarled legs.  She was seized by the irrational thought that if she reached out to touch them, they would melt away like wisps of summer fog.

     The girl smiled, seeming to take no notice of her new professor's preoccupation.  "I'm Rebecca Stanhope.  Sorry I'm late.  It took me a while to find a cab large enough to accommodate my chair.  It's a pleasure to meet you."  Her hand remained outstretched.

     Tearing her gaze away from the girl's withered limbs, McGonagall took the proffered hand.  "Quite alright," she heard herself saying.  "However, your delay has left us most pressed for time.  We'll have to hurry to get you on board.  Come along, now."  She turned and strode briskly toward the barrier.

     The girl, still smiling, followed suit.  McGonagall watched her through half-lidded eyes, and against her will she found her gaze returning to those lifeless parodies of human limbs.  They were pale, almost translucent, and so skeletal that her kneecaps bulged outward like hard tumors.  They were the most unnatural legs she had ever seen.  Looking at them made her want to laugh and scream, to harrow her face with her neatly trimmed nails and leave bright red weals of blood.

     _Get a hold on yourself, McGonagall, _her mind chided.  She took a deep, steadying breath.  "Do you know how the barrier works?"

     "No, ma'am."

     "It's quite simple.  This is a magical barrier into our world.  One just need walk through this wall.  I'll go first.  Wait until no one is watching, and then follow me.  Don't hesitate.  I'll be waiting for you on the other side."  She gave the girl a tentative smile, took a furtive look around, and stepped nimbly through the brick wall.

     Once on the other side of the barrier, she heaved a sigh of relief as a great weight lifted from her chest.  Back in the wizarding world at last.  She stood on platform nine and three-quarters, waiting for the student to appear.  Before her, the scarlet Hogwarts Express idled lazily on the tracks, steam puffing from its stack, its enormous engine rumbling within its steel hull like the purr of a great red lion.  Its power reverberated beneath her feet, sending distant shivers through her lower legs.

     Students and parents scurried alongside the great, slumbering, red hulk, lugging bags and disgruntled pets to open compartments.  Shrill laughter rang out as older students reunited with friends and classmates.  First-years huddled close to their parents, reluctant to leave the security of the familiar.  Some wept silently, hiding their red, blotched faces from the older, more experienced students.  

     From the bustle of the milling crowd came a cloud of red hair, and a moment later Mrs. Weasley emerged, followed by her twin sons, Fred and George, and her daughter, Ginny.  Ron was nowhere to be seen; mostly likely he had already met up with Harry Potter.  The two were inseparable.

     "Hello, Minerva," she said, stepping up to wrap her in a hug.  "Made it back from the Muggles, I see.  But where is the student?  Didn't she come?"

     "Hello, Molly dear.  It's wonderful to see you.  Yes, she's here.  I'm just waiting for her to pass through.  She should be along any minute now.  Hello, Fred; George; Ginny."  She nodded in the direction of the three redheaded children.

     "Hello, Professor.  Did you have a good summer?" asked George.

     "Indeed I did.  The annual Animagus Conference in Prague was most enlightening.  Now, if you three will excuse us, I'd like a word with your mother.  Off to the train with you."

     "Aw, but Professor, we want to see the new student," wheedled George.

     "Yeah, we've been wondering about her since Dad mentioned her.  I say she's going to be quite the beauty, but George says she'll look like something from the dregs of Knockturn Alley.  We've got five pounds riding on it," said Fred.

     _I'm afraid George is about to be five pounds the richer, _she thought, and the memory of those fragile, ruined legs welled up within her.  "You'll have plenty of time to get to know the new student.  She will be boarding the train momentarily.  Until then, she will just have to remain a mystery.  Off with you now."

     George opened his mouth to protest, but she fixed him with her sternest glare, and he though the better of it.  Shoulders slumped in defeat, he turned and muttered something to the other two, and they turned toward the train, casting furtive glances over their shoulders in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the mystery pupil when she materialized from the barrier.

     "How bad is she?" asked Mrs. Weasley once the children were out of earshot.

     McGonagall sighed, took off her glasses, and began to polish them on the sleeve of her blouse.  "Much worse than I expected.  Her legs-," she trailed off, groping for the adequate words to describe the profound horror of that child's legs.  She could not.  "Well, I just don't see how they could possibly _be._  Honestly, I don't understand why Dumbledore chose her."  

     "Maybe he thinks she can benefit from what Hogwarts can offer.  I always thought he was of the mind that every wizarding child deserved a chance to learn."

     "He is, and I agree.  I just don't know how we're going to handle her.  Hogwarts isn't equipped for her condition."  McGonagall finished polishing her glasses and perched them astride her hawk-like nose again.  "I'm not even sure if that…that thing she rides around in is capable of navigating stairs."

     "What thing?"

     "I don't have any idea what it's actually called.  It looks like a one-seater carriage, though.  Four wheels.  She drives it with this stick, and when it moves, it makes this odd, burring sound.  It's some hellish nightmare the Muggles have cooked up.  The things they invent to do without magic.  They frighten me, Molly, they really do."

     "Ah yes," Mrs. Weasley said brightly, "Arthur told me about those.  I think it's called a wheeled chair, though I'm not certain.  Some sort of rolling chair to take the place of legs.  Runs on exceltricity."

     _Exceltricity.  _Something about that word set off warning bells inside her head.  The Muggle Studies teacher had been talking about it one day in the staff room.  He was constantly going on and on about the wonders of Muggle civilization.  No one paid him much mind, not even his students.  There was something important about this exceltricity, though she couldn't recall just what.  And it hadn't exactly been called exceltricity, either, but something very close.  

     _Excel-, Ekel-, elec-.  That was it.  Electricity.  But what was so important about it?  _Then she remembered.  Electricity interfered with magic.  Magic rendered electricity useless.  _Merlin's beard._

     A thousand vivid horrors paraded through her mind as she imagined the student trapped halfway between the worlds, in eternal limbo because magic had sapped the energy from her wheeled chair.  She thought of the young girl's plaintive screams as she pounded on the solid brick walls and begged for release.  Was she trapped there even now, alone and terrified in the dark?  More than enough time had passed for her to come through the barrier.

     She was just about to roll up her sleeves and go in after her when the girl emerged from the brick wall, one stick-like arm still clutching her parcels.  She smiled when she saw them.

     "Sorry it took so long, Professor McGonagall, but people have a tendency to stare at me.  Those that don't usually try to help me.  Right after you left, two porters tried to give me a hand.  They thought I was trying to board the train bound for Essex.  They would've put me on it, too, if some old lady hadn't started complaining of chest pains.  I slipped away when they turned to check on her."  She caught sight of Mrs. Weasley.  "Hello!  I didn't see you there.  Are you a professor at Hogwarts, too?  I'm Rebecca Stanhope."

     Mrs. Weasley stepped forward with a smile.  Like McGonagall, her eyes darted down to the girl's spindly legs, remaining there a moment before returning to her upturned face.  "Hello, dear; I'm Mrs. Weasley.  I'm sorry to say I don't teach at Hogwarts.  I'm just bringing my four children.  I'm sure you'll meet them soon enough.  They're all in your House.  I'm sure you'll have a wonderful time this year."

     "Heavens," cried McGonagall, "we must be off.  The train leaves in three minutes."

     With a hurried goodbye to Mrs. Weasley, she led her charge toward the waiting steam engine.  Most of the students had already boarded; the few remaining stragglers gazed at Rebecca with ill-concealed interest, as though she were a fascinating new exhibit at the zoo.  McGonagall noted with a mixture of dismay and relief that they, too, seemed mesmerized by her odd, angular body and misshapen legs.  

     She stopped in front of an empty compartment.  "I'm not certain how we're going to get you aboard.  I'm afraid your wheeled chair is too large to fit inside."  She stood awkwardly beside the compartment.  It occurred to her that there was much they had not considered.

     "That's alright, Professor.  Professor Blosker said something like this might come up.  He taught me several modified spells he thought might be useful."

     She shifted uncomfortably in her chair, her face contorted and reddened with effort.  One thin, bony hand shot out with slingshot suddenness and clawed toward her hip.  She grappled with the fabric of her skirt and pulled a wand from its folds.  It was short, no more than six inches, with a wide polished oak handle.  She wrapped her stiff fingers around it and smiled.

     "Here goes nothing," she said, and pointed the wand at her sunken chest.  _"Automus Wingardium leviosa."_

She rose from the chair, her legs dangling bonelessly beneath her.  Her tennis shoe-clad feet scraped the ground as she floated toward the compartment door.  When she reached the threshold, a flick of her wrist sent her up and inside.  Another flick pivoted her toward the seat and sat her gently down.

     "It worked," she said, sounding surprised.  Then she turned her attention to the chair sitting forlornly on the platform.  She pointed her wand at it and murmured a Shrinking Charm.  There was a flash, and the eight hundred pound chair shrank to size of a small handbag.  Then, "Accio wheelchair."  The chair streaked inside and came to rest on the seat at her side. 

     McGonagall watched Rebecca handle these tasks with keen interest.  Despite her bent and twisted bones and reluctant muscles, she handled her wand and the performance of magic remarkably well.  There had been no hesitation, no fumbling of wand, no stumbling over the incantations.  She had performed the spells as well, if not better, than most of the students in her class.  She appeared to be on pace with the rest of the fifth-years.  There would be no need to waste valuable time playing catch up.  Someone had trained her well, and clearly the staff at D.A.I.M.S. had given a great deal of thought regarding the obstacles she might have to face in her new environment.  The gnawing worry that had roosted in her chest since realizing the extent of Rebecca's condition abated a bit.

     "Well done, Miss Stanhope," she said crisply, and stepped onto the train.

     It began to move before she had a chance to sit down.  She rocked and swayed with its motion as it pulled out of the station with a grinding roar of steel and turning gears.  The floor lurched softly beneath her feet.  She reached out a hand to steady herself.  Rebecca, sitting limply in her seat, pressed her thin fingers into the cushions to keep from toppling sideways.

     When the lurching buck of the train had settled into its customary rocking trundle, McGonagall dropped her hand and crossed to her seat.  She sat down, smoothing her skirt.  The worst was over.  She had survived the Muggle world and returned with both her charge and her sanity intact.  Now she could relax and study the wan young girl across from her.

     She saw at once that she could have been beautiful.  Deep blue eyes the color of the sea looked out of a face with full, pouty lips.  The spun gold of her hair fanned over small shoulders and tapered to her waist.  

     But her affliction had ravaged her, marred what could have been spectacular beauty.  The pockets of deep sea gazed out of fragile, skeletal sockets.  Gaunt, sharp cheekbones jutted harshly against her skin.  An incongruously large bosom, two sandbags tied to a post, jutted from her narrow chest.  The weight of them pulled her forward, rounding her shoulders, withering her.  She was a boggart imitating a young girl.

     And then there were the legs.  Eyes stealing down to them like a surreptitious voyeur, she took in their unfathomable thinness.  They seemed fashioned of pressed gossamer, but whoever had made them had not known what they were doing.  The kneecaps, bulging from the flat plain of her legs, were higher than they had any right to be.  Below them, the shins faded into eggshell, hollow-boned ankles.  Her arches had fallen, and upon closer inspection, she saw that one leg was nearly an inch longer than the other.  Her lower half was a poorly made child's toy.  Looking at them was surreal; it made her head spin.

     "Professor."  The voice cut through her haze of concentration like a cold knife.  She snapped out of her reverie with a start.

     "Yes, Miss Stanhope?"  She wished mightily for a steaming cup of tea.

     If my legs are disturbing you, I can cover them, maybe use a Concealing Charm."

     McGonagall sat back abruptly, mutely appalled.  Had she really been so obvious?  She supposed she had.  _Heaven only knows what the poor creature must think of me, _she thought.  "No, Miss Stanhope, that won't be necessary," she said weakly.  "It's just that we at Hogwarts weren't sure what to expect.  I'm afraid it's been a bit of a-,"

     "Shock?" Rebecca finished, a sardonic smile creeping across her face.

     McGonagall nodded.  She waited for the girl to continue, perhaps to expound on her condition, but she made no sound.  She looked at her a moment longer with that knowing, sardonic smile, and then turned to look out the window.  The bitterness in that smile made her wince.

     They sat in silence watching the hills and pastures rolling by in an endless vista of green.  Here and there, white flecks of farmhouses sprouted from the rolling earth like mushrooms.  Brown and black splashes, horses and cows grazing on the tender grasses, passed in a blur.

     McGonagall heard footsteps in the corridor and groaned inwardly.  Fred and George, no doubt, coming to settle their bet.  She hoped that they at least had the good sense to mask their reaction.  If that wry, bloodless smile was any indication, Rebecca was none to fond of discussing her malady.  Heaven help them if she saw the exchange of money.  Sure enough, the footsteps stopped outside the compartment, and a moment later two fiery heads appeared.

     She tensed, waiting for the sharp intake of breath or the frozen, shocked stare, but nothing of the sort happened.  Fred and George entered the room as though nothing were amiss.

     "Hello, there!  I'm Fred Weasley, and this is my brother George.  We thought we'd come to say hello."  He stuck out his hand.

     Rebecca took the proffered hand.  "I'm Rebecca.  Pleased to meet you both."  She smiled.

     "Mind if we sit down?"  He gestured at the empty space beside her.

     "No, not at all."

     "Professor, are we interrupting anything?" asked George.

     McGonagall shook her head.  "Certainly not.  In fact, now that you boys are here, I think I'll go change out of these abominable clothes.  If you'll excuse me."  With a curt nod, she slipped from the room, closing the door softly behind her.

     "Never seen her on the train before.  You must be awfully important," said George.

     Rebecca shrugged.  "I don't think so.  I'm just a transfer student from the States."

     "The States, eh?  Didn't even know they had a school of witchcraft there," said Fred, intrigued.

     "It's not much of one.  Only about forty students.  I guess there aren't that many witches and wizards where I come from."

     "Where do you come from exactly?" asked Fred.

     "A small town in Florida called Whitting's Glen.  Don't imagine you've heard of it."

     The boys shook their heads.  "'Fraid not.  Are there other wizards there?"  George rested his chin on the palm of his hand.

     Rebecca snorted.  "Not likely.  The place is barely a town.  Two streets, one stoplight, a barbershop, a general store, a church, and a gas station are all there is.  The population is just over a hundred, all of them Muggles, even my parents.  I'm the only one."

     "Where is this school you went to?" asked Fred.

     "D.A.I.M.S.?  It's in Saint Augustine.  Everyone thinks it's just a school for the deaf, blind, and disabled.  Only the teachers and students know differently."

     Before he could stop himself, Fred blurted out, "So are they all like you then?"  It was the first mention either of them had made regarding her disability.

     There was a long, painful pause, the room silent save for the rhythmic clacking of the train as it hurtled along the tracks.  Fred looked down at his feet, blushing furiously.  George sat frozen, unsure of how to proceed.

     _You stupid git, _Fred thought.  _You're a bloody idiot.  Very smooth, very compassionate.  _

     Rebecca was not offended.  She was, in fact, relieved.  The white elephant everyone had been so studiously ignoring had at last been acknowledged.  Yes, the question had been tactless, but it was honest.  He hadn't goggled at her like McGonagall, hiding his curiosity under a veneer of cool acceptance.  He had indirectly cut to the heart of the matter.

     "Not exactly like me, but everyone there has a problem of one sort or another.  Deaf.  Blind.  Thirteen in wheelchairs.  Even the teachers have disabilities.  It would look a bit odd for well people to be there."

     "What, er, is wrong with you?" ventured Fred, aware that he was treading on dangerous ground.

     _Ah, the question comes at last, _thought Rebecca.  "I was born with Cerebral Palsy, a Muggle birth defect that damages part of the brain and often causes deformed bones.  I can't walk."

     "So how do you get around?" They looked at her and around the room, searching for her means of mobility.

     "I use a wheelchair.  That's it there."  She pointed at the shrunken wheelchair sitting beside George.

     "This?  Bit small, isn't it?"  George picked it up and turned it over in his hands.

     "Don't be stupid!  Can't you see it's been shrunk?" laughed Fred.

     "Oh.  Right.  Dad says it runs on exceltricity.  Is it true?"

     "You mean electricity.  Yes, it does.  Professor Blosker says Hogwarts has hundreds of charms on it and my chair won't work on the grounds, though.  He enchanted it with a modified levitation spell."   

     "Wow.  D'you think my dad could have a look at it sometime?  He's crazy about Muggle technology," said Fred.

     "I don't see why not, as long as he doesn't try to take it apart.  I'm helpless without it."

     Fred and George exchanged glances.  "Maybe you shouldn't let him near it, then," said George.  "He tried to take an old radio apart once to see how it worked.  The pieces are still scattered about his workshop."  The boys laughed at the memory.

     The pained scree of a warped cart wheel announced the arrival of the food cart.  A plump, grey-haired witch stuck her head into the compartment.  Her motherly smile faltered when she saw Rebecca perched on the seat like a badly made rag doll, then wrenched itself back onto her face like an unpleasant cramp.  

     "Would anyone like anything from the trolley?" she asked, never taking her eyes off Rebecca.

     "I'll take half a dozen Chocolate Frogs and three pumpkin juices, please," said George, pulling out a sparse handful of Galleons, Sickles, and Knuts from the tattered pocket of his trousers.

     "No, thank you," said Rebecca, her formerly light tone buried beneath a thin scrim of ice.

    Rebecca looked at the woman and fought to keep from grinding her teeth.  She had seen the look of surprise and loathing on the woman's face, if only for an instant.  How could she not?  It was a look she had seen ever since she had been old enough to look for it.  It was a look of pity, a look of fear, a look of repulsion.  It was a look that said, "Thank goodness I'm not you."  It was the look that branded her freak.

     She felt the bile of bitterness swell in her throat, choking her.  She hated that look.  It had marked and colored every facet of her life.  It even invaded her dreams, searing itself onto the tender skin behind her eyes like a badge of shame.  The mark of the outsider.  The familiar hatred seethed in the pit of her stomach, coiling around her intestines like the grip of a strangling snake.  It slithered up her throat to nest behind her eyes, simmering there, waiting to strike.

     Some of what she felt must have shown on her face, because the trolley witch nearly dropped the three bottles of chilled pumpkin juice as she passed them to George, and she averted her gaze from Rebecca's eyes, as though even a casual glance into them would cause irrevocable blindness.

     "Y-your juice and your change," the witch stammered, shoving the few Knuts into George's upturned palm.  She grasped the cart and fled the room without a backward glance, the warped, wobbly wheel giving a terrified squeal as she departed.

     "What's up with her?" puzzled George.  "Looked like she'd seen a devil."

     Rebecca said nothing.  The twins did not know, had not seen, and that was fine.  They would not understand.  Only people like her, the broken and shunned, ever could have.

     "Have a pumpkin juice," said Fred, offering her one of the bottles.

     She took it.  "Thanks."  She wrapped her fingers around the top and twisted.  It didn't budge.  She tried again and only succeeded in scraping palm against the metal cap.  "I'm sorry, but I can't seem to get it open.  Could you help me, please?"

     "Sure."  George plucked it from her hand, opened it with a casual flick of the wrist, and handed it back to her.

     "Thank you."  She wrapped her fingers around the cool glass bottle and took a generous swig.  It was cool and good on her parched throat.

     They sat quietly for a spell, enjoying the chocolates and the drinks, and she watched them.  She envied them their effortless, fluid grace, how they moved without thought.  Their long, supple fingers did not wage war against the thin tin foil wrappers of the Chocolate Frogs as hers did, but rather caressed them like old friends, or perhaps lovers.  She felt no hatred for them only a profound, stabbing longing to be as they were.  She watched them and said nothing.

     "Do you like Quidditch?"  George asked, licking chocolate from his thumbs.

     Rebecca took another appreciative swig of juice and nodded.  "Don't get to see much of it, though.  The only match I've ever seen was the Quidditch World Cup last year.  The entire D.A.I.M.S. group went as a field trip.  We had planned to stay a few days, tour Britain.  The teachers thought it would be a good cultural experience.  When things went south, it was decided that we should leave.  So much for the field trip."

     Fred and George both nodded.  They knew exactly what "going south" meant.  The chaos following the World Cup had been the harbinger of things to come.  The Dark Mark glittering green against the night sky had been the herald of the calamitous events that would culminate in the murder of Cedric Diggory and the resurrection of He-Who-Should-Not-Be-Named.

     "Does your school have a Quidditch team?"  George polished off the last of his pumpkin juice and set the empty bottle on the ground between his feet.

     An image came to Rebecca's mind of Andrew Neuman, a boy at D.A.I.M.S. who suffered from Muscular Dystrophy, a disease that weakened the muscles little by little until they were too weak to even make his chest rise and fall, a disease that guaranteed death by suffocation.  She imagined him perched on a broom, weak arms feebly clutching the handle, trying to steer it.  She imagined Joey Laughton, a blind sixth-year, trying to steer through opponents and avoid Bludgers with only his ears to guide him.

     She laughed, a guttural barking sound that surged from deep within her chest.  She rocked back and forth, fists clenched.  The muscles of her arms, agitated by her mirth, pulled her forearms back to her shoulders in a spastic jerk until she looked like an undernourished strongman trying to hoist a barbell.  Her face had gone an alarming shade of red.

     "D.A.I.M.S.?  A Quidditch team?  You can't be serious," she gasped, swiping her streaming eyes.  "Oh, it would be a disaster!  We wouldn't need Bludgers; we'd be falling off on our own.  It would be a slaughter.  Even if we could round up enough students healthy enough to keep a grip on their brooms through anything stronger than a light breeze, there aren't enough students to justify the effort.  We wouldn't have an audience."

     "It's worse than I thought."

     The cool, arrogant voice came from the doorway, and Rebecca turned to see a tall, thin, pale boy with platinum blonde hair.  His overcast grey eyes roved over her hunched form, his face a mask of disdain.

     "What is that?" he asked George.

     "Sod off, Malfoy," came the reply.

     "I'm Rebecca Stanhope.  Who are you?"

     The boy ignored her completely.  "A hidden, particularly rotten branch of the Weasley family tree?" he drawled, contempt dripping from every syllable.

     "She's a transfer student from the States."  George had stood up and was regarding Malfoy with sharpening rage.

     "From the States?  Dumbledore isn't content to open Hogwarts to the dregs of Great Britain; now he's bringing in foreign filth, too.  Tell me, are your parents wizards?"  For the first time, he addressed Rebecca directly.

     "No," she answered.

     "I thought not.  No purebloods would ever end up with something like you.  A MudBlood of the worst stock.  Were your parents related?"  He gave her a vicious, triumphant smile.

     Rebecca studied him.  It was obvious even now that this Malfoy was going to be stunningly handsome, likely possessing a beauty equal to his incredible hauteur.  High, Slavic cheekbones pressed gently against an alabaster face.  His grey eyes held an expression of calm superiority, one that she was quite certain was as natural to him as breathing.

     She hesitated to rise to his challenge, not because she feared him, but because she almost admired his raw, undisguised prejudice.  He was the sort of enemy she could understand, one that made no bones about his feelings or his motives.  He made no excuses.  He wore his hatred like a badge of honor.  He hated her cleanly, with no misgivings or second thoughts.

     _All right, Malfoy, I accept your challenge, _she thought.  "Malfoy, was it?" she asked.

     "That's right.  Draco Malfoy."  He drew himself up.  Obviously the name was a source of great pride to him.    

     She looked him up and down, measuring him.  "Nice robes.  You must come from a family of great influence."

     Draco nodded smugly.  "One of the oldest wizarding families in Europe."

     "And one of the richest?" she asked.

     Another nod.  He was reveling in her flattery.

     "Your mother must be beautiful."  She chose her words carefully, as though handling nitroglycerin.

     "She is.  More beautiful than anything you could imagine."

     Behind her gaunt, impassive face, Rebecca smiled a poison fang smile.  Already she could smell his weakness, like infected blood from an open wound.  His vanity made him blind, leaving him open for the tearing plunge of a serrated knife.

     "They must have been so happy before you came along."  An innocent, syrupy smile flooded her face.

     The satisfied smirk melted from his face.  "What would you know about my parents, MudBlood?  Your parents probably cursed God the moment they saw your face," he spat, lithe fingers curling into a tight fist.

     She did not flinch from his words; she had heard them and countless others before.  Besides, an accepted truth could do no harm.  Behind the mask, the reptilian smile grew wider still.  "True, but at least my parents don't have to pretend to give a damn."  The smile never left her face.

     The room was utterly still.  Fred Weasley watched this escalating confrontation with profound unease.  He didn't think it wise for Rebecca to be provoking Draco.  If he decided to attack her with his wand, she would be helpless.  She would never be able to dodge in time.  And yet, it seemed that she was enjoying the proceedings.  Her eyes danced, dappled with sparkling glimmers of energy, and in her usually wan cheeks were hectic rose blooms.  She clearly thought the game was afoot, and he was worried.  If it came down to wand-play, he wasn't sure he would be able to reach his own wand in time to intercept him.  He slid his fingers toward the pocket of his trousers.

     Draco whipped out his wand with a snarl.  "You'll pay for that, MudBlood!"

     "Will I?"  She sounded amused.

     Professor McGonagall, coming down the corridor to tell the Weasleys and Miss Stanhope to put on their robes, sensed immediately that something was going wrong.  She saw the back of a platinum-blonde head in the doorway.  Draco.  He was certainly up to no good.  As she drew closer, she heard Fred Weasley's voice, low and threatening.

     "Put down the wand, Malfoy," he said.

     She came upon them just in time to see Fred and Draco with wands aloft, glaring menacingly at each other.  George stood behind Fred, his wand in one, white-knuckled hand.  Rebecca sat silently on the seat, eyes darting between the two foes.

     "Yes, put down your wands.  Both of you," she snapped, stepping into the room and drawing out her own wand from the folds of her emerald robe.  "Just what is going on in here?"  Her stern eyes flickered back and forth, demanding an explanation.

     "Professor, Malfoy came in here and started insulting Rebecca.  He called her a MudBlood and threatened her with his wand," cried Fred, still waving his wand.

     "Mr. Weasley, I said put your wand away NOW," she snapped.  Then she rounded on Malfoy.  "Is this true?"

     He stared at her in sullen silence.  She could see the fury still smoldering in his eyes, and behind that, his cunning mind searching for a feasible excuse.

Finally, he mumbled, "We were just talking."

     "Honestly I'm appalled.  Not even at Hogwarts and causing trouble.  I'll be having a talk with your head of House when we arrive."  She turned to the twins.  "As for you two, it's time to get into your robes.  We're nearly there."

     "May I go, Professor?" asked Malfoy, shooting an ugly glance at the sedate Rebecca.

     "I suggest you do," answered the professor, looking down her narrow nose at him.

     He skulked away, followed by Fred and George, who departed with friendly waves.

     "Miss Stanhope, that goes for you as well.  Get into your robe.  I have to leave now.  I have to get to Hogwarts and prepare for the Sorting.  If you need help, just look for Hagrid, a rather large man in a moleskin coat.  He'll be happy to help you."

     "Yes, Professor."

     McGonagall gave Rebecca a last, searching look before she left the compartment.  There was something different about her now.  She looked more vital, less fragile.  She looked energized.  Well, it wasn't her concern.  She had other matters to tend to.  She left without a word. 

     When the professor had gone, Rebecca exhaled a shaky breath.  The adrenaline still pounded in her veins.  That had been close.  If Malfoy had succeeded in getting off a spell, things would have gone badly for her.  She was unprepared, and worse still, tired.  All the same, she'd had no choice.  If she had not risen to the occasion, he would have marked her as easy prey.

     From deep within her mind, the thought surfaced- _And you enjoy the fight._

     Yes.  It was true.  She _did _revel in the art of confrontation.  She loved the battle of wits and wills, the sour tang of adrenaline in her mouth, the vibrating thrum of it in her veins.  She savored seeing dreadful realization dawn in an opponent's eyes when they realized they had underestimated her and were about to suffer the consequences.  She loved these things and did not deny it.  

     But for all her love of confrontation and the feelings it brought, she was not a violent soul.  She welcomed them when the need arose, but she did not look for them.  She did not seek out battle, but she did not flee from it.  She defended herself and those she loved without mercy.  She would not be cowed.

     She did not just put on her robe; she went to war with it.  She writhed and struggled with it, beating it into submission over her thin, knotted form.  The tie was not so easy to best.  It slipped through her fingers like a greased eel, and she cursed it.  By the time she had tied it into some semblance of proper form, she was red-faced and sweaty.

     When the train ground to a halt a few minutes later, she disembarked the same way she had boarded.  To her surprise, she saw no school, only a line of carriages.  An enormous man was waiting beside one of them.  

     _That must be Hagrid, _she thought, and started toward him.

     "H'lo," he rumbled as she approached.  "I'm Hagrid.  McGonagall tol' me you'd be along.  "Will you be needing help gettin' into the carriage?"  His black eyes glittered amiably beneath bushy black eyebrows.

     "No, thank you.  Pleased to meet you, though," she said, peering up at him.

     "Same.  Well then, I'll be getting along.  Got to get the first years across the lake.  If you need me, just send the word."  He disappeared with a wave of his mammoth hand.

     She levitated herself into the carriage, shrank her chair, brought it inside, and closed the door.  She wrinkled her nose against the smell of must and age.  Then the carriage began to move, swaying gently from side to side.  It was difficult to see through the thick spumes of dust, and at first she could see nothing.  Then she saw it.

          Hogwarts, the ancient castle, of wizard-child dreams loomed up before her, piercing the dark, star-littered canopy of the sky with numberless stone turrets and spires.  The warm glow of candlelight spilled from the windows like a beacon.  It stood sentinel over a mirror-glass lake that had captured the moon in its liquid cage.  As she looked closer, she could see tiny fireflies dancing on the moon-glazed surface.  No, not fireflies.  Torches.  Squinting, she saw the outlines of a dozen small boats with the shadowy forms of people inside.  A large, hulking bulk sat in the lead boat.  Hagrid and the first years.

     She stared at the scene before her in mute, gape-mouthed wonder.  She had never expected anything like this.  Was this really where she would spend the next three years?  The very idea made her feel dizzy, and she closed her eyes.

     _Backing away from a challenge? _she asked herself.

     The blood in her veins began to race.  Not on her life.  Not for anything in the world would she have missed this.  The wave of dizziness passed.  She opened her eyes and went forward to the greatest challenge she would ever face, a challenge that would push her skills and her morals to their limits and call into question everything she had ever believed, a challenge that would help decide the fate of the magical world.

     For Rebecca Stanhope, the greatest battle of wits and wills that she would ever know had begun.


	2. Fang of the Serpent

Chapter Two

     Rebecca Stanhope would remember her first glimpse of the Great Hall of Hogwarts for the rest of her life, even after images of war and death and blood and hatred had stained her vision.  She sat in the entranceway, the other students spilling around her as they moved to their seats, and stared in open awe.  Nothing had prepared her for this.  D.A.I.M.S. and its professors had subscribed to the philosophy of understatement and concealment.  Magic was hidden, performed in the darkest of alcoves and under the watchful, draconian eyes of a staff more concerned with protecting the school from prying Muggle eyes than with teaching the great art of magic.  But here, here, they reveled in magic, worshipped it, gloried in it.  Magic was the _reason_ for this place, not an afterthought or a pleasant diversion to distract the students from the fact that they were not wanted or needed by the world outside.

     She craned her neck to get a better look at the ceiling, and the breath caught in her throat.  She was seized by the sudden, absurd urge to weep.  The high ceiling was a mirror image of the night sky she thought she had left behind.  Bright stars twinkled with stunning brilliance against a backdrop of utter black, and interspersed among them like paralyzed fireflies were delicate white candles bobbing on a gentle wind.  It was exquisite; it was grand.  She could feel the magic of it tingling in her fingertips and thrumming in her forearms.  There was power in this place, and she knew instinctively that everything, absolutely everything, was about to change.

     A voice came from far away.  "Easily impressed, Mudblood?"

     She jerked her head in the direction of the voice, wincing as the tendons in her neck spasmed.  Malfoy stood flanked by a pair of oaf-faced, heavy-footed behemoths.  His arms were folded across his chest, and he looked at her with undisguised loathing.  His lip curled in a dangerous sneer.

     "It's beautiful," she said.

     "Some of the simplest magic there is," he scoffed, and his cronies guffawed obediently.  

     She merely looked at him.  She didn't know what to say.  The magic in this hall didn't seem simple to her, but her exposure to real wizardry had been very limited at D.A.I.M.S.  America was still a bit frigid and wary of the magical element within its borders; the Great Witch Hysteria of 1692 was still a contentious and emotionally charged topic among the preeminent scholars of the country, and the tiny American Ministry of Magic, running things from a cramped, sweltering, windowless basement in the bowels of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., was determined to keep a low profile.  No ostentatious displays of magic were permitted-no enchanted ceilings, no decorations, no frivolous charms.  As far as the U.S. Ministry was concerned, magic was a tool, not a gift, and it was to be used sparingly.

     Malfoy's snide remark, as ugly as it was, reminded her of just how little she knew of the world into which she had been born and in which she now found herself.  Hogwarts was indeed going to be an education, and a difficult one at that.  She looked at Malfoy in his beautiful malevolence, blinked slowly, and then said, "I didn't know that."

     The sneer widened into a vicious smile.  "That doesn't surprise me at all, you being a Mudblood."

     "Yeah," chortled the larger of the two cronies, the one she would later come to know as Goyle.  "A Mudblood.  And a freak."  This last came slowly, as if he had been pondering it at great length.  The others joined in his trollish laughter, and Malfoy rewarded him with a devilish grin and a clap on the back, a master praising his clever dog.

     "Shove off, Malfoy."  Fred and George Weasley materialized from among the few remaining stragglers entering the Hall.  Fred was advancing on Malfoy with knitted brows and closed fists.  George was equally grave, eyes fixed on the suddenly cautious Crabbe and Goyle.

     "Don't worry.  I wasn't doing anything to your latest pet project, Weasley.  We were just talking.  What are you so worried about?  Do you fancy her?"  Malfoy gave her an appraising glance.  "You know, from the look of her, I'd say she'd fit right in with everything else you Weasleys own-she's just as broken down and useless."

     "I do not fancy her," Fred snapped, "and she's not broken or useless.  Leave her alone, you arrogant little tosser, or I'll do some breaking of my own."

     Rebecca watched the brewing confrontation with a stoic cynicism.  Things like this had happened before, and they almost always ended badly.  The kindly do-gooder versus the evil, uniformed bastard was a duel as old as affliction, and though she was always at its heart, she was never more than a periphery spectator.  If all went as it usually did, Malfoy would offer up a scathing retort, and Fred, her designated knight-errant, would be obliged to respond.  Soon enough, fists or wands would fly until the adults in charge arrived to break up the scuffle.  A trip to the headmaster's office would be in order for the combatants, who would each offer a jumbled account of what had happened.  She herself would be ignored, a prop that had served its purpose.  At least until the next round of red-faced fistcuffs.  She fought to stifle a sigh.

     Malfoy was about to execute his role in the sordid little drama when he stopped abruptly, eyes darting to the front of the room.  Rebecca followed his gaze and saw a long table, behind which sat a row of large, ornate golden chairs.  All of the chairs were occupied, save one.  In the center chair sat someone who could be none other than the headmaster, and though he was regarding the unfolding scene with a level, keen gaze, it was not at him that Malfoy was looking.  He was, in fact, glancing two chairs to the right, at a gnarled, bent old man clutching a stout oak walking stick.  The wizened little man wore a thunderous countenance, and he was glowering at Malfoy with acute disdain.

     "We'll finish our little chat later," said Malfoy, casting a nervous glance toward the scowling professor.  "I've better things to do than get into a scuffle over something that isn't worthy of the bottom of my shoes."  With that, he swaggered away, sniggering cohorts in tow.

     "That's right," Fred called after him, waving a balled-up fist and oblivious to the heads that were beginning to turn in his direction, "slink away, you weak-livered coward."

     "Don't pay him any mind," George whispered conspiratorially in her ear.  He's an arrogant little git with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.  "Don't worry about Malfoy, either.  Come on, let's find a seat; the Sorting's about to start."

     "The Sorting?"

     "Yeah.  All the first years get sorted into their Houses by the Sorting Hat, a dusty, musty, mad thing that never makes much sense.  It's only interesting if you've got family that's coming up.  Other than that, it's quite dull, really."

     George opened his mouth to say something else, and then he stopped short.  "Oh," he said, confusion spreading over his face.

     Her heart sank.  She knew what that "oh" meant.  Something was wrong.  It didn't take her long to see exactly what.  They had reached the Gryffindor table, where the rest of the House was patiently seated before empty golden plates.

     _Dammit, even here reality intrudes,_ she thought bitterly.  Her outer mask of implacable composure remained in place.

     "What shall we do?" asked Fred, who had also spotted the dilemma.

     "I don't know," she answered.

     This was a problem she had not foreseen.  Neither had any of the D.A.I.M.S. professors.  The long wooden benches that served as seats for the students were beautiful, but they were useless as for as she was concerned.  There was no space, not even a single inch, for her wheelchair.  She could not reach the table.

     "I've got an idea," she ventured at last.

     She pulled out her wand and pointed it at the end of the bench.  "_Desaparercium bench end!" _she commanded.

     The spell worked, but not exactly as she had intended.  Instead of removing only the very end of the bench, the entire bench disappeared in a green flash.  Gryffindors spilled onto the floor, sprawling in a rumpled red mass.  There were yowls and barks of pain as elbows and shins made contact with smooth stone.  There was a moment of stunned silence, and then the rest of the Hall exploded in disbelieving laughter.

     She froze, wand clutched so tightly in her shaking fingers that she could hear the groaning of the wood.  Her face grew hot.  Gryffindors were staring at her as they picked themselves up and dusted themselves off.  There was no understanding in their eyes, only ridicule and condescension.  The laughter of the other students slashed as sharply as a razor against her ears.  She squeezed her eyes shut, as if closing her eyes would blot out the terrible sound, made worse because it was deserved.  She bowed her head as though awaiting a blow.  She could feel the beginnings of sharp, tearing spasms in her arms and legs.

     _Oh, please, please God, not here.  Don't let the cramps start here.  Don't let them see._

     She took a deep breath, willing the cramps away, fighting the rising tide of panic.  If she couldn't calm herself soon, the spasms would come in earnest, ripping at her bones, muscles, and tendons with claws of jagged glass, contorting her limbs and forcing a scream from between gritted teeth.  They mustn't see her that way, especially the professors.  She didn't want them to regret the decision to bring her here.  If they saw her in the throes of those terrible spasms, they would very likely rescind her transfer and banish her once again to her humdrum existence at D.A.I.M.S.

     Her throat had shrunk to the size of a pinhole, and she fought to breathe air as thick cold fog.  The laughter was starting to fade now, and from far away she could hear Fred or George asking her if she was all right.  Another voice, strident and mocking, called, "Nice going, Mudblood!"  Draco.  Panic tightened its grip, and she knew that in a few moments she would pass out in front of the entire school.

     Just then, the doors to the Great Hall swung open, and McGonagall appeared with the first years at her heels.  

     "What on Earth is going on here?" she demanded, taking in the indecorous carnage the disappearing bench had caused.  Her blazing eyes fell on Rebecca's hunched, wheezing form and the still outstretched wand.

     "Wait here," she snapped at the goggling first years, and marched to where Rebecca and the twins stood.  "Miss Stanhope, what is going on?  Why is your wand out?"

     Rebecca looked up at the exasperated face of Professor McGonagall through blurred, stinging eyes.  The panic attack was getting worse, numbness swallowing her hands and snaking up her arms.  The teacher was standing over her, waiting for an answer.  She forced her jaw to unhinge and stole a shallow breath.

     "I'm sorry…Professor, I-I," she wheezed.

     "She was just trying to make room to sit at the table," offered George.

     "I don't recall asking your version of events, Mr. Weasley," said McGonagall crisply.  "Now, Miss Stanhope, what were you doing?" 

     She couldn't answer her.  _It feels like I'm drowning, _she thought.  

     She sat there, face upturned, choking on the lump in her throat, waiting for the axe to fall.  Her tenure at Hogwarts had lasted twenty minutes.

     A soft voice came to her rescue.  "It's quite all right, Professor McGonagall."

     The headmaster had left his seat and now stood at Rebecca's left arm.  Looking at him, Rebecca felt some of the tension leave her body.  The cramps that had been steadily worsening since her mishap with the bench ebbed, and the vise around her chest loosened.  He radiated goodness and Light, and she was grateful for his presence.

     "_Aparecium bench!" _ he said, flicking his wand casually in the direction of the Gryffindor table, and the bench reappeared in its original place.  The Gryffindors, who had been standing since the crisis had begun, seated themselves with a collective sigh of relief.

     "Is there something wrong, Miss Stanhope?" he asked, peering at her over the rims of his half-moon spectacles with twinkling blue eyes.

     "Well, yes, sir," she began hesitantly, so relieved to find no condemnation in those eyes that she felt faint, "the table…I'm afraid there's no space for my chair."

     Dumbledore surveyed the table for a moment.  "So there isn't," he said jovially.  "Well, we'll soon set things to right."

     He stepped back and raised his wand, the sleeves of his robes sliding back to expose slender wrists.  "_Reducto!" _he muttered.

     There was another flash, purple this time, and a narrow section of bench evaporated, leaving a space just wide enough to accommodate her chair.  Several students applauded.

     "There now," said Dumbledore, beaming at his handiwork.

     "Thank you, Headmaster," said Rebecca.

     "Most certainly, my dear.  However, in the future, if you should have a question concerning the proper use of magic, don't hesitate to ask one of the professors for help.  They'll be happy to assist you."

     "Yes, sir."

     Oh, Miss Stanhope, come to my office first thing tomorrow so that we may discuss any other spells or assistance you might need."  

     Yes, sir."  When Dumbledore started to return to his seat, Rebecca said, "Um, excuse me, sir?"

     "Yes?"

     "Where is your office?"

     "Oh, Good heavens!  Of course!  It's just down the corridor, behind the gargoyle statue.  The password is "Bertie Botts."

     "Yes, sir."

     "Excellent!"  To McGonagall, who had been waiting impatiently with the fidgeting, ashen first years, he said, "Carry on, Professor," and returned to his seat.

     With disaster averted, the Sorting got underway, and Rebecca watched with avid interest.  It was certainly a far cry from the staid, clinical procedure at D.A.I.M.S., where students were sorted and classed by virtue of extensive psychological testing.  What the results of those tests were was anyone's guess, but they must've shown something, because the school was divided into two Groups.  Falconhawk, or Advanced Group, to which she belonged, and Badger, or Remedial Group, to which all but seven of the pupils belonged.

     "Carsten, Jacob," McGonagall called, and a slender, ruddy boy with lips like a trout ambled to the empty stool.  The tattered, pointy Sorting had was placed upon his head, and after some quiet rumination, the Hat bellowed, "Hufflepuff!"  The Hufflepuff table clapped dutifully, though as far as she could tell, they did not care one way or another about their House's latest acquisition.

     "How does the Hat work?" Rebecca whispered to George.

     "No one knows for certain, but it seems to read your mind when you wear it.  Been doing it for a thousand years."

     "Has there ever been a mistake in the Sorting?"

     "I don't think so."

     She turned this over in her mind for a while, while the Sorting went on and on, one wan, pinched terrified face after another made the short pilgrimage to the three-legged stool and the ragged hat that would decide their wizarding future.  _It seems to read your mind when you wear it.  _She found the thought profoundly disturbing.  She was suddenly very glad she had been spared the Sorting Hat.  There were things in her mind that belonged to her and her alone, and nothing, not even a magical Sorting Hat, had any right to them.

     _Would you understand, oh wise and wonderful Sorting Hat?  Would you understand what lives and breathes inside my mind?  Would you understand what you saw there, or would you shy away just like everyone else and leave me to be a shadow child?_

She was jerked from her reflective reverie by the pronouncement of "Zyrbysk, Charles" as a Slytherin.  The rowdy crows and catcalls of the Slytherin table nearly drowned out Dumbledore as he rose to make the beginning-of-term speech.

      "Greetings and welcome to what I hope will be another wonderful and fulfilling year at Hogwarts.  I am so glad to see so many familiar faces as well as faces I hope will become just as familiar.  I have a few announcements to make before we can get to the more serious business of filling our stomachs.  First years should note that the Forbidden Forest is off limits to all students.  Students are not to leave their Common Rooms after supper.  Also, in light of the unfortunate events of last year, all students are advised to travel with a companion or teacher whenever possible.  Any suspicious activities are to be reported to myself or any other staff member at once."

     No one, not even Rebecca, needed to ask what the "unfortunate incident" might be.  Lord Voldemort had risen again and killed a Hogwarts pupil named Cedric Diggory in the process.  His murder had even made the American wizarding papers, though most of the small community there quickly forgot it.  It hadn't happened to them after all, and an entire ocean separated them from the shadow of corruption that was stealing through Great Britain like a disease.

     "Visits to Hogsmeade for those students in the third year and above will continue," Dumbledore went on, and this was met with a low cheer, "but from now on Hogwarts staff will be chaperoning these trips, and all participating students will be required to check in with a professor every two hours.  Any student failing to abide by these new rules will be prohibited from going on all future trips.  Therefore, any student not wishing to remain behind with Professor Snape, who had graciously volunteered to remain at Hogwarts, should follow these rules precisely."

     A collective groan rippled through the Hall, and a chubby boy seated toward the middle of the table blanched to the color of rancid cream and began trembling from head to foot.

     Rebecca leaned over to Fred.  "I take it this Snape fellow isn't terribly popular."

     Fred snorted.  "The day Snape is gracious about anything is the day Professor Trelawney makes an accurate prediction."

     She was nonplussed.  "Professor Trelawney?"

     Fred shook his head, as if to say he would explain everything momentarily, and she fell silent.

     "Now, with all that bothersome and likely ignored huggermugger out of the way, let's eat," exclaimed Dumbledore with a clap of his hands.

     Rebecca had never seen so much food in all her life, and she blinked in surprise at the mountain of food she discovered on the plate in front of her.  Whipped potatoes, green beans, sugar peas, chicken legs, and pumpernickel bread were piled upon her platter, and even more food lined the table.  There were steaming bowls of butterbeans, tureens of thick gravies, plates of warm, syrupy candied yams, and endless jugs of pumpkin juice and buttermilk.

     "George," she said after they'd been eating for a while, "who was that professor that unnerved Malfoy so much?"

     George spluttered, spraying breadcrumbs across the table.  "That," he said, swiping at his mouth with a linen napkin, "is quite the story.  That's 'Mad Eye' Moody, the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor.  He's a good teacher, but he's a bit of an odd duck, if you see what I mean.  Bit paranoid, especially after spending an entire school year trapped in his own trunk."

     "Well, he was daft before he went in there; that just exacerbated the problem," interjected Fred, spearing a forkful of green beans.

     "Well, yes, conceded George, taking a sip of pumpkin juice.

     She threw up her hands.  "Wait, wait, locked in his trunk?"

     Fred shrugged.  "Long story.  The point is, Moody turned Draco into a ferret last year for trying to sneak-attack Potter.  Bounced him like a Bludger against the floor.  Since then, Malfoy has given him a wide berth."

     "A ferret?  Really?"  She eyed the bent professor with new respect.

     "A ferret.  He squeaked with every bounce."  He threw back his head and emitted a high, terrified squeak.

     The image of prim, haughty Draco squawking in abject terror as his beady rodent eyes bulged and his whiskers twitched was too much.  She laughed, her arms jerking up once more into the posture of an overburdened weightlifter.  The whipped potato-laden fork she had been holding in a trembling hand snapped up and forward with catapult force.  The potatoes it had been cradling flew through the air to spatter on George's forehead.

     She was instantly appalled.  "Oh, George, I'm sorry!  Merlin's beard, forgive me!  It _is_ George, isn't it?"  Her face had gone a deep plum.

     George sat quietly for a few seconds, a dollop of potatoes dripping from his forehead onto his spotless robes.  She hid her face behind the golden curtain of her hair and waited for the indignant remonstration.  Instead, she heard him laughing.  She looked up to see him wiping off his forehead with his linen napkin, a broad grin etched across his face.

     "No worries.  Fred and I usually end up covered in something, what, with all our exploding experiments."  He finished cleaning off his face and returned the wadded napkin to his lap.

     "Experiments?"

     "That's right.  We want to open a joke shop someday, only we don't want the same old things everyone else has, so we invented some things of our own."

     "Yeah, like Ton-Tongue Toffee," offered Fred.  Suddenly, he perked up.  "I don't suppose you'd like to help us test some of our newest products?"

     She considered it for a moment.  They seemed like nice fellows; they certainly treated her with a respect she had not expected to find so quickly.  And it was only joke paraphernalia, after all.  How bad could it be?  "All right."

     "Fabulous," said Fred, a glint in his eye that she didn't quite care for.

     "Now," said George, throwing a chummy arm around her misshapen shoulders, "let me tell you about our esteemed faculty."

     While the twins were regaling Rebecca with various amusing anecdotes about the Hogwarts professors, Severus Snape sat at the High Table, stabbing irritably at his food.  Though his pale face was devoid of any expression, his black tar eyes smoldered with mute fury and dismay.  He stared at the pitiful hunched form of the new student as he shoved a slice of smoked ham into his mouth.

     What was Dumbledore thinking?  He couldn't possibly expect him to teach her, could he?  He could see just by looking at her that she would be a bigger disaster than Neville Longbottom, the bane of his existence, could ever fathom.  He had been tallying the number of cauldrons she would melt, disintegrate, implode, or otherwise mangle over the course of the school year, and she had already trebled the number that idiot Longbottom had obliterated in his first four years.

     Not to mention the accidents.  He impaled an unfortunate cluster of carrot slices on the tines of his fork.  There were a thousand different ways in which she could maim or mutilate her fellow pupils.  True, he had often secretly wished for those bothersome Gryffindors to be immolated into a mist of ash, but he was not keen to have it done on his watch, not in his precarious position.  Suppose she should have another one of those monstrous spasms that seemed to wrack her every time she became agitated, and spilled an excessive amount of an extremely volatile ingredient into a delicate potion?  The results could be catastrophic.  The Gryffindors, the Slytherins, perhaps the entire school, could be vaporized in a mushroom cloud of magical mishap-all because Albus Dumbledore had decided to be charitable.  It was madness.  He brutalized a piece of beef with his fork.

     "Is something wrong, Severus?" asked the Headmaster, sensing his discomfort.

     "Surely you can't expect me to teach her?" he retorted, flicking his eyes to indicate Rebecca.

     "Why not?  All her transcripts indicate that she is fully capable of performing her assignments."

     "You can't be serious.  Look at her, for Merlin's sake.  She can barely hold a fork, much less a beaker of volatile potions.  You're begging an accident, Headmaster."

     "I'm quite sure you are capable of keeping things well in hand, Severus.  You're an excellent teacher," came Dumbledore's placid reply.  He popped a segment of tangerine into his mouth.

    "Perhaps if I had been graced with any competent students at all, you might have a point.  But I am not so fortunate.  I've never been cursed with a more hopeless bunch.  No, Headmaster, it's impossible."

     "Severus, you're overreacting.  How can you possibly be certain they're all incompetent when you haven't even had a first lesson yet?  Besides, they aren't _all _horrible.  There is Hermione Granger."

     "I know because it has always been so," he sighed.  "In the entire seventeen years I've been forced to interact with these little cretins, not one of them has shown any aptitude for Potions whatsoever.  I don't expect them to start now."  He dropped his fork with a clatter and kneaded his temples.

     "Except Hermione Granger," Dumbledore reminded him cheerfully.

     "Hermione Granger would excel in the Botany of Slow-Growing Mold Spores Only Found Between the Toes of Hogwarts House Elves Forty or Older if there were such a subject," he groused wearily.  "That isn't the point.  She isn't in Miss Granger's league."

     "Indeed not," Dumbledore conceded.  "Then again, not many are."

     "Pointless and nauseating praise for Miss Granger aside," snapped Snape, "I cannot teach that girl, Albus.  Between her and that hapless Longbottom twit, they would be carting me off to St. Mungo's inside of a week."

     "Really, Severus, I think you're behaving ridiculously.  All indications are that the young lady is perfectly qualified to be here.  I think you should wait until you've had an opportunity to instruct her before passing judgment," said Dumbledore, becoming slightly exasperated.

     "I don't need to wait; I trust my eyes implicitly, and they tell me this is a mistake.  She's a danger, Albus, to herself and anyone unlucky enough to get within a hundred meters.  She doesn't belong here.  Send her back where she belongs, and spare us all a great deal of trouble."

     "And on what do you base that assessment, Professor?" asked Dumbledore, turning the full brunt of his gaze on Snape.

     Snape shifted uncomfortably in his chair.  This wasn't going as well as he'd hoped.  "Professor Dumbledore, sir, _look_ at her.  She's a travesty of the human form, an-,"

     "Appearance has nothing to do with intellect," Dumbledore cut in.

     "As Miss Granger so admirably demonstrates.  But she will be a distraction."

     "One could classify Neville Longbottom as a distraction," the headmaster pointed out.

     "Precisely.  And you know what I think of him."

     "Or Harry Potter," continued Dumbledore.

     "Yes," he hissed through gritted teeth.  The mention of his arch nemesis always brought bitter bile to his throat.  "And you know what I think of him."

     "Indeed.  You've never been shy concerning Mr. Potter," observed Dumbledore drily.  "Then there's Seamus Finnegan."

     Snape groaned at the mention of his least favorite pyromaniac.  The boy incinerated something with his wand at least once a week.  "Yes.  And you know what I think of him."

     "Absolutely.  And they're all excellent pupils.  Mr. Potter, in particular, has distinguished himself, in spite of your less than sparkling opinion."

     Snape said nothing.  The headmaster had trapped him with his own logic quite neatly.  So he tried another tack.  "Professor, how can you be certain that she hasn't caused some calamity at that obscure little school?"

     "D.A.I.M.S. has informed me of no such incident."

     Snape snorted.  "How can you be sure those people would know what such an accident was?"

     A heavy silence descended upon the table.  All of the mundane chatter ceased, and all heads turned in his direction.  McGonagall especially was radiating dignified horror.

     "Those people?  Pray, what do you mean by 'those people?"  Dumbledore's normally placid gaze had suddenly gone glacial, and Snape realized he was treading brittle ground.

     "People in her condition, sir.  They don't attend that school because they happen to be sparkling examples of wizarding excellence."

     "Miss Stanhope performed magic perfectly well at King's Cross," McGonagall sniffed.  "Honestly, this is ludicrous."

     "She destroyed the Gryffindor bench because she didn't know a simple removal charm."

     "Have you never made a mistake, Severus?" Dumbledore said quietly.

     Snape bristled.  The Headmaster was not referring to his potions or his teaching, skills, and he knew it.  "Of course I have," he said tightly.  "But-,"

     "That's enough, Severus," Dumbledore said, his voice clipped and making it abundantly clear that he would tolerate no further argument.  "That young lady deserves the best education we can give her, and as a professor at Hogwarts, it is your sworn duty to see that she gets it.  Is that clear?"

     Snape was gritting his teeth so tightly that he could hear them grinding against one another.  Blood was pulsing in his temples.  From the corner of his eye, he saw Moody watching him with a smirk.  "Yes, sir."

     "Good."

     Dumbledore stood to draw the welcoming feast to a close.  As the students filed out, their bellies full to bursting with succulent delights, Snape watched the retreating figure of Rebecca as she moved slowly toward the exit.  So Dumbledore wanted him to instruct her?  Fine.  He would instruct her.  He would teach her everything he knew about the unfairness of life, the wanton cruelty of it, and by the time he was finished with her, she would crawl to Albus on her knees and beg to be sent home.  Yes, she was going to have quite the learning experience.

     It was almost enough to make him smile. 


	3. Shades of Gray

Chapter Three

     A very disheveled and stiff Rebecca made her way to the Headmaster's office the following morning, weaving her way clumsily through the throng of other bleary-eyed pupils as they headed to their first class of the day.  Some of them eyed her with wary interest as she passed, taking in her rumpled robes and flyaway hair.  She gave no sign that she saw their inquisitive looks, but she saw every one of them.  She always did.  She had been seeing them since the formation of first coherent thought; she was trained to spot them in the same way a blind child was taught to discern objects by touch alone.  She couldn't _unsee them, no matter how hard she tried, and she __had tried, but in the end it cost too much of her already scarce energy, and she had simply let the looks filter into her mind like smoke through a screen._

     She felt a stab of resentment.  Why did they always have to stare like that?  She knew what she looked like.  She had been living with this body and looking at it in the mirror for the past fifteen miserable years.  She certainly didn't need their ogling to remind her that there was something wrong with her.  She felt the wrongness of her flesh in every movement of every muscle or misfired twitch of sinew.  She saw it in each odd jut of bone or sunken pocket of flesh.  She knew what they were thinking because she felt the same.  She hated the alien strangeness of her body, the prison of skin and bones she inhabited.  She would have fled from herself if she could.

     She flashed them a flat, expressionless gaze, hiding her venomous contempt behind layers of frigid, detached calm.  She stuffed the bitterness deep inside; she would never let them see how she truly felt, never lose her carefully crafted composure.  If she did, then even people she had a modicum of affinity for, like Fred and George, would turn away, and she didn't want that.  She wanted to be left alone by _them, not alone._

     She stopped in front of the huge stone gargoyle, swiping a hand across her eyes and smoothing her rumpled robes.  She looked a mess, and she knew it.  She had slept in her robes without showering.  She simply could not bring herself to undress in front of the other girls.  She hadn't wanted them to see her naked.  The very thought of their curious eyes on her most intimate parts made her flesh crawl and her stomach tighten.  So she waited until the lights winked out and the room went blind, but by then she was too tired from the day's exertions to make the effort, and she fell asleep in an untidy sprawl atop her coverlet.  Now she would have to go before the Headmaster in this unkempt condition.  A guilty flush crept up her neck, but there was nothing to be done for it now.

     "Bertie Botts!" she said, and the huge statue swung outward to reveal a spiraling stone staircase whose steps floated dreamily toward dizzying heights.

     She rolled her chair onto the first step with a hiss of appreciation, the enchanted wheels hovering an inch above the hard surface.  The steps slid noiselessly upward, and she locked the brakes, praying there would be no sudden jolt to snap her forward or send her careening into the unforgiving walls.  Worse yet, she saw the Levitating Charm failing and sending her toppling down into the abyss, pulverizing every fragile bone into powder.

     _Stop it! she chided herself.  __You've got enough to deal with without imagining even more horrors for yourself._

_     The steps halted in front of a massive mahogany door bearing a breathtaking carving of the Hogwarts crest.  It was coated in a deep cherry varnish, and it gleamed with the evidence of countless polishings and waxings.  She reached out her hand and touched the smooth surface, marveling at its exquisite craftsmanship and texture.  It spoke of antiquity and grandeur, of tradition and pride.  It was alive, the very antithesis of D.A.I.M.S, with its modern, utilitarian walls, the steel, quiet elevators, and the pungent, sanitary reek of disinfectant that screamed out sickness and infirmity better than any of the twisted, pain-wracked visages that dwelled within its walls.  D.A.I.M.S. was a soulless institution, its viscera as cold, as flaccid as a corpse, but Hogwarts was vibrant; Hogwarts lived and breathed as it had for ten centuries.  Hogwarts was hope._

     She shook herself a little as she knocked softly on the door.  It was not like her to have such flights of fancy.  Normally, she was as analytical and pragmatic as the school in which she had been taught, but since coming here she found herself thinking outside her usual parameters, dreaming of what could be rather than focusing on what was.  That was dangerous.  It could lead to lofty expectations and disappointment, and she had had quite enough of both.

     "Come in," came the muffled voice on the other side of the door.

     She pushed the door open, careful not to scratch the wood with her wheels as she passed, and found herself in the most interesting of offices.  Dozens of portraits lined the walls, all of them home to wizened old men in pointy hats in varying degrees of repose.  Some smiled beatifically from behind a huge oak desk, quills poised over inkwells.  Others snored peacefully as they lounged in an overstuffed red chair.  She smiled faintly as she looked at them.

     Aside from the pictures, the room was cluttered with wondrous things.  The Sorting Hat rested atop a bookshelf crammed full of magnificent leather-bound volumes.  A Sneakoscope sat on the corner of the Headmaster's desk, which was piled high with scrolls and blank parchment.  Across from the desk was a bird, a phoenix, in fact.  She had never seen one before, and she moved in for a closer look.

     He was a brilliant red, and he gazed benignly at her as she peered at him.  He smelled musty, but not unpleasantly so.  It was a warm smell, a singularly avian smell, and she took a deep breath.  The bird gave a bemused squawk and began to preen, sidling down his perch.

     "Beautiful, isn't he?" said the Headmaster from behind her.

     She started and turned around.  Caught up in the beautiful oddity of her surroundings, she had quite forgotten that she was not alone.  "Oh, yes, Headmaster," she said sheepishly.

     "No need to be embarrassed, Miss Stanhope.  I still find it all amazing myself, and I've been here a very long time.  Come, we have much to discuss."  He motioned her closer to the desk, the same desk, she noted, depicted in all the portraits.  It must have been here as long as the school itself.  She suspected that nothing in the castle had changed since the last stone had been mortared into place.  "I hope you don't mind, but I thought to ask your Head of House and Madam Pomfrey to join us. Lemon drop?"  He offered her a bowl filled with the sweet candies.

     "No thank you, sir."

     "Tea, then?" offered McGonagall, gesturing to a silver tea tray beside the chair in which she sat.  She already had a steaming cup raised to her lips.

     "No, ma'am."

     She was too nervous to drink tea, or anything above the temperature of an ice cube.  She was sure she'd jostle her cup and send the Headmaster and the venerable professor to the infirmary with severe scalding.  Better to play it safe.  In truth, she was more than a little uncomfortable with the presence of Madam Pomfrey.  Medical personnel of any sort made her uneasy; they usually brought with them suffering of one sort or another.  She desperately hoped the Headmaster didn't want to give this Madam Pomfrey to give her an exam right here in his office.  She didn't think she could bear the humiliation of being put on display before the people that held her academic future in their hands.

     "Well now, according to your transcripts, you're quite a capable student," he said, riffling through a series of parchments.

     "Thank you."

     "You seem particularly adept at Charms and Arithmancy."

     "Well, I find Charms quite useful, sir.  Couldn't get by without them."

     "Quite so.  Alas, it also says here that you are not so skilled in Potions, though you can complete the work if given sufficient time and some special equipment."

     "Yes, sir."

     "What sort of equipment did you have in mind?"  Dumbledore leaned forward, palms flat against his desk.

     "Well, there's the enchanted knife to help with fine cutting, larger beakers, and a special control release beaker to ensure that just the right amount of a volatile ingredient is added and not a drop more."

     "Sounds quite sensible and relatively easy to get.  These things are available at any well-stocked apothecary, yes?"

     She shrugged.  "I suppose.  D.A.I.M.S usually ordered all necessary supplies."

     "Indeed.  We have a brilliant Potions Master teaching here at Hogwarts.  I'm sure he can help you to improve your Potions.  He will gladly assist you in procuring these items and familiarize you with his expectations."

     There was a choking cough from McGonagall, and Dumbledore turned inquisitive eyes in her direction.

     "Forgive me, Headmaster.  Bit of tea in my throat," she said, daubing at her mouth with a linen napkin."

     Rebecca got the distinct impression that this was not entirely true.  Yes, there was a fine spray of tea on the Professor's robe, but there was an unaccountable dim alarm in her eyes, a sort of horrified incredulity.  A look passed between the two professors.  _Not a word, that look said.  Before she could puzzle over it in her mind, the Headmaster was addressing her again._

     "Now, Miss Stanhope, not to be an insensitive lout, but I must ask you, are there any other ways in which your… malady might impede your progress in the classroom?"

     She blinked.  That was certainly the most diplomatic way she'd ever heard that question posed.  "Well, sir, I'm afraid I can't write with regular quills.  My hands just don't have the required dexterity," she mumbled.  Even after all the times she had endured this particular torturous ritual, she still felt a deep, abiding shame at conceding her shortcomings.

     "Ah, I see," said the Headmaster.  "Well, what do you prefer to use then?"

     "A Dicta-Quill, sir.  One for each professor."

     "Remarkable.  But I'm not certain how that will work for the upcoming N.E.W.T.S.  You are taking them this year?"

     She nodded.

     "A Soundproofing Charm," suggested McGonagall, setting her empty cup and saucer down on the table.  "To make sure it is done precisely, the professor can set it just before the start of the exam."

     The Headmaster pondered this for a moment, fingers steepled beneath his chin.  "Yes, that will do," he said with a slight nod.  "Excellent."

     "I have a few questions, sir," Madam Pomfrey said from her seat.  It was the first time she had spoken.

     "Do you mind, Miss Stanhope?" asked Dumbledore.

     She did mind, but she saw no reasonable escape from it.  "No, sir."

     "What is the exact nature of your ailment?" asked Madam Pomfrey, taking out a quill and picking up a nearby piece of parchment.

     Rebecca bristled.  She did not have an ailment.  An ailment could be cured with patience and time.  Nothing would cure her.  Doctors in both worlds had tried, poking, prodding, scanning, and slicing her until she screamed and begged for the sweet mercy of anesthesia.  She bore the scars of their useless good intentions all over her body.  In one of her crueler moments, her mother had told her she looked like a scored rib roast.  That remark had earned her a slap in the mouth from her father, something for which Rebecca had been savagely grateful.  She suffered no ailment; she was cursed.

     "I have Cerebral Palsy, a condition that affects the bones, muscles, and neuromuscular coordination.  It is a congenital condition.  It cannot improve, but it can degenerate.  It does not negatively affect my cognitive capabilities," she said, reciting from memory the myriad of evaluations doctors of every imaginable stripe had written about her.

     "Umhm.  Are there any side effects or secondary disorders of which I should be aware?"

     "I sometimes have severe muscle spasms in the legs.  They can be controlled with a mild dose of muscle relaxant, though I prefer to avoid taking it whenever possible."

     "Why is that?" interjected Dumbledore.

     Rebecca gave a wan smile.  "A painless existence can be very addictive, Headmaster."

     No one spoke for a moment.  Then Madam Pomfrey said, "One last thing, dear.  Is it contagious?"

     The change in Rebecca's demeanor was so swift that it was frightening.  The cautious, open expression she wore disappeared, replaced by a cold, vicious blankness.  Her lips thinned, and her eyes darkened.  She had gone very rigid.

     "No!  It most certainly is not contagious," she snarled.  She turned to Dumbledore.  "Headmaster, I do not wish to discuss this any further.  Not until Hogwarts'…medical personnel has an opportunity to better inform herself about my condition."

     Dumbledore raised a placatory hand.  "There is no need to become insulting, Miss Stanhope.  I assure you, Madam Pomfrey is a most excellent Mediwitch.  We here at Hogwarts simply have no experience with this sort of thing.  Given time, we shall surely be able to provide you with an outstanding learning and social experience."

     She took a deep breath.  "Forgive me, Headmaster, I lost myself for a moment.  It will not happen again."  To Madam Pomfrey, she said nothing.

     She was really not a bit sorry about what she had said, but she had learned through the years that diplomacy was often the most prudent course of action.  Despite the misgivings she harbored about McGonagall, who still seemed to be hypnotized by her ungainly legs, and Madam Pomfrey, who seemed to possess the medical knowledge of a young mountain troll, she felt an innate respect for the Headmaster.  He, at least, could pretend to understand, could successfully hide his morbid curiosity.

     "Is there anything else we should know, Miss Stanhope?" he asked, and she saw his eyes flicker momentarily to the tangled mess of her hair.

     "Er, well, it's a bit embarrassing-."  She broke off, her cheeks furnace-hot.  She could not meet the Headmaster's kind eyes.  She fixed them on a point behind the wizard's head.  "There are things I cannot do for myself - bathing, tying laces…other things."  She wasn't about to elaborate on "other things."

     Thankfully, Dumbledore did not press her.  "How was this handled at D.A.I.M.S.?"

     "A house elf.  His name was Dinks.  I wanted to bring him here with me, but they wouldn't let me.  They said he was school property."  She spat the last word as though it were something bitter.

     Dinks had been her friend.  He bathed and groomed her, and sometimes he would come to her in the night and tell her stories of far-off places.  She often fell asleep to the sound of his whispered, fluting voice and dreamed of the places and things of which he told her.  He always remembered her birthday, and on Christmas Day he brought her a gift-usually a pair of socks.  He made her laugh when she felt like crying, and it was he who stayed to comfort her when the agonizing spasms were at their worst.  He was not property.

     "Were you fond of Dinks?" asked Dumbledore.

     "Yes," she said, nodding vigorously, "yes, I am."

     "Very well, then.  I shall write to D.A.I.M.S. at once and see if they are willing to send Dinks to Hogwarts.  If not, perhaps we can arrange a business transaction."  He gave a sardonic smile.  "In the meantime, I believe I have an elf who would be more than happy to help you.  She lost her entire family recently, and I believe it would do her good to care for someone.  When you return to your room after supper, she will be waiting for you."  He smiled at her from behind his half-moon spectacles.

     His smile was infectious.  She felt her face breaking into a genuine grin.  "Thank you, sir."

     "If there is nothing else, you may go to your next class, which I believe is Care of the Magical Creatures.  Hagrid will be delighted to see you.  Off you go now."

     "Yes, sir."  She gave a polite nod to him and McGonagall.  She did not acknowledge Madam Pomfrey.  She let herself out.

     When the door closed behind her, Dumbledore sat thoughtfully behind his desk.  "Very curious, indeed," he said at last.

     "What is it?" asked McGonagall.

     "She is a very complex young lady, Minerva," he answered, looking at the door with a pensive expression.

     McGonagall nodded.  She knew exactly what Albus meant.  The girl had a tempestuous temperament at best.  It made her slightly uneasy.  When she had unleashed her tongue on Madam Pomfrey, McGonagall had seen the same mysterious vitality she had witnessed on the train after her spat with Malfoy.  Clearly, she thrived on conflict.

     "Is she dangerous, do you think?" McGonagall asked.

     Dumbledore reached out and twirled the shaft of a quill between his fingers.  "I don't think so.  Just confused, defensive, and more than a little bitter."

     "And rude," sniffed Madam Pomfrey.  "How dare she insult my experience and qualifications!"

"Don't take it to heart, Poppy," soothed Dumbledore.  "To be perfectly truthful, none of _does know much about her condition, yourself included.  And I suspect doctors and Mediwizards have given her more than enough cause for mistrust and doubt.  According to her file, she's seen more than forty without the least bit of improvement.  I'm sure she meant no insult."_

_     "Still," continued Pomfrey, "she's quite the dour little thing.  Doesn't seem the Gryffindor type."_

     "Yes, Albus, why did you place her in Gryffindor? I noticed she was never officially Sorted," said McGonagall.

     "Ah, yes," said Dumbledore with a smile, popping another lemon candy into his mouth.  "In her case, I felt leaving her Sorting to chance was a bit too risky.  She needs stability and someone in whom to confide should problems arise."

     "Perhaps, but isn't it a bit unorthodox?  No student has ever been exempted from the Sorting, if my memory serves."

     "Your memory is excellent, as always.  However, bear in mind that there is no established orthodoxy as far as Miss Stanhope is concerned.  If we are to beginaccepting more students in similar condition, I think it best we discover precisely what worksandwhat does not, even if that means temporarily bending tradition for our first attempt."

"But why me?"

     "I felt she would flourish best under your auspices.  You can give her just the right balance of flexibility and discipline.   Flitwick and Madam Sprout are remarkable, but I fear they may be a bit too lenient  Severus is an excellent teacher and Head of House, but I hardly think he has the patience for someone such as her."__

_     "No, his comments at the table last night left that in little doubt.  So why in the name of Merlin are you so adamant that she study Potions under him?"_

     "He is the only Potions teacher we have, and Potions is a core subject.  I am willing to make accommodations with regard to her physical comfort, but I refuse to make concessions in academics.  She will have to participate in all required subjects, just like the rest of her peers."

_     "Agreed, Headmaster, but why didn't you warn her about Professor Snape's…reclusive, taciturn nature?"_

     "None of the other students received advance notice of his personality when they arrived," pointed out Dumbledore.  "As a Slytherin, Severus is already subject to enough unwarranted prejudice.  No need to add to it by alarming the girl unnecessarily.  She will_ experience Severus for herself soon enough."_

     "Yes, but sir, you told her he would gladly help her.  The only thing he would gladly do is tear her apart," said Minerva, fussing with the collar of her robe.

     "I think you sadly underestimate him." – 

     _And I think you severely overestimate him, she thought fiercely, but she kept that sentiment to herself.  "It's your decision, naturally, but I tell you he's going to destroy that girl."  She stood.  It was nearly time for her second class of the day.  Moody had covered her first, but would not be available any longer than that._

     "I'm not so certain of that, Minerva, not so certain at all."

     While her erstwhile professors were debating the wisdom of exposing her to the irascible, unforgiving Potions Master of Hogwarts, Rebecca was making her way across the expansive green toward Hagrid's hut.  Her classmates were already there, clustered around Hagrid, whose great shaggy head poked above the cluster of bent heads.  Scarlet scarves mingled with bright canary yellow, which meant the Hufflepuffs were also part of the class.  Hagrid looked up as she approached.

     "Lo," he bellowed happily, waving her over.  "'Bout time ya got 'ere.  Everythin' go all righ' wi' the Headmaster?"

     "Yes, sir."

     He grunted to himself, "Great man, Dumbledore," then speaking to Rebecca, "C'mon up an' have a peek at these."

     She weaved her way into the throng courtesy of the path the other students made for her, and looked down into the large wooden crate that was the focus of everyone's attention.

     "What are they?" she asked.

     "Those," Hagrid said proudly, "are Swedish Borgergups!"

     No one had ever heard of such a creature, so Hagrid picked up one of the round, football-sized beasts and let it sit in his cupped hands.  It was a breathing ball of brown sugar-colored hair with two squat, stubby legs.  A pair of winsome black eyes blinked at them, and a pair of small, pointed canines bookended a saliva-dripping black tongue.  Hagrid beamed paternally at it.

     "These li'l fellas are used to track gnomes and badgers.  Go' a great sense of smell, they 'ave, and their long coats make 'em so they can' feel the cold.  They can live fer up to three hundred years and can make great pets."

     A tentative hand went up.  "Um, Hagrid, do they bite?"

     "Occourse they bite.  Not people, though.  They're very gen'l."

     No one seemed particularly reassured.  An uneasy murmur arose from the assembled students, and Rebecca noticed several of them, exchanging knowing, stricken looks.  Hagrid seemed not to notice their trepidation.  He was too busy passing out the fuzzy creatures and talking to them in a nonsensical singsong.

     She leaned over to the boy at her side.  "Why is everyone so nervous?"

     "Hagrid is a great fellow, but he has a penchant for strange, usually dangerous creatures.  Last year, he made us tend to Blast-Ended Skrewts.  Bad business, that.  Lost most of my eyebrows."

     She shuddered.  She knew about Blast-Ended Skrewts.  The Potions professor at D.A.I.M.S., a profoundly deaf man who screamed everything at the top of his voice, had once tried to harvest some Skrewt carapace for an anti-inflammatory potion.  The Skrewt had kept its carapace, but the unfortunate Professor Kravitz had lost most of the skin on his arms as well as his eyebrows.  He wisely decided to harvest only dead Skrewt carapaces after that.     

     Hagrid stopped in front of her with the box.  "Here you are now.  The las' one.  You'll be workin' in pairs, so how about you and Seamus here," he said, gesturing toward the boy to whom she had been speaking.

     He handed her the last Borgergup.  The chubby, dandelion-like beast panted happily at her, legs paddling at the air.  Saliva from his hanging tongue dribbled onto her robe.

     "Bit of a messy thing, aren't you?" she said, and smiled at it.

     The Borgergup might have been one of the more popular creatures during Hagrid's tenure as Care of Magical Creatures teacher had not the poor beast chosen that moment to be ill.  With a wet gurgling, it vomited all over her robes.  The thick liquid splashed her collar and slid onto her lap, where it pooled in a warm puddle.  The Borgergup looked at her sadly, as if to say, "Oh dear.  Sorry about that."

     She was too stunned to react.  She just held the panting, paddling creature in her dripping hands and blinked incredulously at the steaming gray mess coating her robes.  Seamus, luckily unscathed by the eruption, was looking on in grinning revulsion, waving his hand in front of his nose to dispel the appalling stench.

     _I'm going to be sick, she thought.  Her stomach heaved, and her gorge tightened.  The taste of bile coated her throat.  She desperately fought the urge to be sick.  It would only make the already overwhelming stink worse, and the other students would surely laugh at her.  She breathed through her mouth and tried not to think about the warm, congealing mess covering her lap._

     "Oh," Hagrid said, momentarily nonplussed.  "Guess they're a mite upset by all the travelin'.  They eat a lot of cabbage, so it makes their digestion…a bit delicate.  Right, then, better get them into a bath."

     The students who had been cuddling their Borgergups suddenly held them at arm's length, lest their own robes fall victim to the foul, stomach-churning discharge.  Hagrid looked at her sympathetically.

     "Sorry about that.  Excitable, Borgergups are.  You can use a Disappearing Charm on the mess, but I'm afraid the smell is here to stay.  Nothing to do for that but a bath and a right good washing.  Might be able to cover it up, though.  Maybe I've got somethin' for it in my house.  I'll go an' have a look.  You two go on into class," he said, and headed off in the direction of his hut.

     "Here, hold this, please," she said to Seamus, who stood next to her, grimacing at the reek.

     Gingerly, he picked up the wriggling fuzzball, careful not to let his hands graze the rapidly drying vomit on her hands.  The Borgergup let off a contented blast of vile flatulence.

     She pulled out her wand, pointed at herself, and said, _"Desaperecium vomit!"_

     As Hagrid had said, the mess disappeared, but the evil smell remained.  It clung to her robes and skin in a nearly visible haze.  She longed to sink into a hot bath and scrub it away, but a bath was several hours away, and there was still the unpleasant possibility that their new pet might disgorge himself again.  She sighed and slipped her wand back into her robe.

     "Big wand you have," said Seamus.

     "Easier for me to grip," she explained.

The class erupted in quiet pandemonium.  Most had already headed for the enclosed paddock that served as the Creatures classroom when several more of the gastronomically volatile Borgergups became ill, covering the students and the fading fall grass with splashes of the greasy gray substance 

_     "I'm gonna be sick."  Seamus had gone an unpleasant green._

"Someone beat you to it," she said, pointing to a large posterior bent over the paddock fence.

_      "Neville Longbottom, poor sod," said Seamus, and a moment later, he made a beeline for a small boulder adjacent to the enclosure._

_     Finally, her own will broke, and she rolled frantically in the direction of a clump of raggedy bushes that nested against the far corner of the paddock.  Her breakfast came up in a gut-churning spasm.  After the fit had passed, she slowly sat up and swiped feebly at her mouth with the back of a shaking hand.  Her stomach felt stretched and hot, and she dreaded going rejoin her classmates.  Even out here inthe fresh air, the foul odor was an undercurrent, blighting the grass and the flowers.  She looked in the direction of Hagrid's hut and saw him lumbering toward the classroom, a bottle tucked__ beneath one enormous arm, oblivious to the havoc that awaited him._

_     "What're you doin' over here by yourself?  Finished washing your Borgergup already?"_

     She could only shake her head, afraid that if she drew a breath to speak, the waves of nausea would assail her again.

"You all right?  Look a bit under the weather."

     "Fine," she said, managing an unsteady laugh.  "Just needed a bit of fresh air, that's all**."**

     Hagrid looked at her closely.  "Something wrong?"

     "No, sir, not with me."

     He suddenly sniffed the air.  What's that awful smell?"  He absently handed her the bottle he had been carrying.  "For the smell," he murmured, and went toward the huddle of confused, dirty students.

     She giggled helplessly and looked at the heavy green bottle.  Madame Magdaline's All-Purpose Turpentine, it proclaimed in bold, calligraphic script.  Turpentine.  She giggled again.  The whole situation was absurd.  She pulled the cork and took an exploratory sniff.  Her nostrils stung from the fumes.  He wanted her to splash herself with this?  It smelled nearly as awful as the Borgergup vomit.  Nearly.  She tipped the bottle and splashed it on her robes.

_     "Blimey!  What happened here?  Have you been shakin' the little blighters?  Quick, use a Disappearing Charm on this mess.  I'll, uh, I'll be seeing Madam Sprout about some nice flowers," Hagrid said.  He turned around and left the corral again, bound this time for Madam Sprout's greenhouses.  "Share that," he said to Rebecca as he passed, pointing vaguely at the turpentine._

     She returned to the others to find the vomit and excrement gone and the students disheveled, pale, and drained.  Seamus was still by the boulder, elbow propped upon the hard, smooth surface, nose turned toward the fresh air.  The boy he'd called Neville was sitting beside him, coughing weakly.  Fred and George's younger brother, Ron, was in the middle of the paddock, bent double and sputtering.  Several of the girls were crying silently while they wrangled with their heavinggorges**.  ******

     "Hagrid told me to share this," she said to Seamus when she reached him.  She handed him the bottle.

     He took it and turned it over in his hands.  "Turpentine?  What the bloody hell for?"

     She shrugged.  "I don't know, but it smells better than Borgergup vomit."

     "_Anything smells better than that," Seamus retorted, taking the bottle and splashing a liberal amount on his robes before passing it to Neville, who sniffed suspiciously at the liquid._

     "Smells like Snape," he muttered.

     "What do we do now?" she asked.  "Do we still try and wash the Borgergup?"

     "I suppose.  We need it more than he does, though," said Seamus.

     "Are you even sure it's a he?"  Neville had finished splashing himself and passed the bottle to a wax-faced Ron.

     "No, and I don't care.  I ought to drown the little blighter," he growled, prodding their Borgergup with his toe.  The poor creature, which had been sitting dejectedly beneath the boulder, whimpered and cringed.

     "Aw, c'mon, Seamus, don't be so hard on him.  I don't like cabbage, either," Neville pointed out.

     Seamus scooped up the trembling creature and carried it to the rows of wooden tubs lined up against the northernmost section of the thick wooden fence.  Each of the tubs was filled with steaming bubble bath, and its citrusy tangerine odor acted as a balm to their tortured noses.  They inhaled it gratefully.

     "Bit too low for you, isn't it? observed Seamus, looking from the tub to Rebecca.

     "Yes, but I think we'll be Ok if we can get one of the tubs closest to the corner."

     "All right then."  He moved to the last tub on the last row.

     She maneuvered he chair parallel to the rough, knobbly pine boards and put onthe brakes.  Her hand groped inside her robes for a moment before producing her wand.  She pointed it at her chest, licking her lips nervously.  She couldn't see them, but she knew the eyes of all the students were on her.  She remembered their laughter from the Great Hall the night before, how it had scalded her nerves like a draught of Ogden's Firewater.  She would be damned if she would give them the satisfaction again.

     "_Automus Wingardium Leviosa!"_

     She felt her legs leaving contact with the seat and suppressed a satisfied grin.  There; they wouldn't be able to laugh at her now.  She levitated herself out of the chair and eased to the ground, making sure to prop her back against the side of the chair.  Without proper support, she would flop as bonelessly as a fish, helpless and ungainly, arms and legs jerking painfully as she tried to right herself.

     "Not bad," said Seamus.

     "Thanks.  What do you want me to do?""

     "You hold him, and I'll wash.  Fair enough?"

     She nodded.  Seamus handed her the Borgergup, and she dunked it into the hot water, an action not appreciated at all.  It began to thrash and howl, legs kicking furiously.  She curled her fingers into the snarls of its hair and held on, her shoulders beginning to burn with the effort as it jerked and lunged.  It spared her an accusatory glance as it struggled.

     "Hurry, Seamus, I don't think I can hold him for long."

     Seamus set upon the little beast with brush and soap, and soon it resembled a hairy snowball.  Unsurprisingly, the Borgergup redoubled its efforts to get away, twisting and pulling.  Rebecca could only hope it did not suddenly recall its formidable teeth and remove her thumbs.  The soap had made it exceedingly slick, and more than once she had to lunge for it as it slipped her grasp and scrabbled over the side of the tub.

     She could not help but notice as they worked that Seamus kept casting furtive glances in her direction.  The all-too-familiar irritation rose in her chest like the sudden flaring of an infected wound.  Could they, just once, try not to be so damn obvious?  She clenched her fists around the Borgergup hair, making it whimper.

     "Sorry, sweetie," she said, and forced her fingers to relax.  To Seamus, she said, "Have I got some vomit on my chin, or should I start charging admission?"

     He dropped his eyes, and that was all the answer she needed.  She focused her attention on the sodden Borgergup, which now resembled a wet mop.  She was seething, her stoic face concealing a burning fury.  She hated it, that clandestine stare, the one they never thought she saw.  Yet they had all given it to her - McGonagall, the witch on the train, Madam Pomfrey - they had all goggled surreptitiously at her.  Now her Creature partner was exhibiting a similar lack of decorum.  Only the twins and the Headmaster had treated her with any dignity.  If it hadn't meant that she would have to hold him down again, she would have let the Borgergup go.

     Hagrid returned with a few pots of yellow Sugarpuffs, sweet-smelling flowers specially bred by Professor Sprout.  He ran into Neville, who was chasing his dripping animal across the enclosure, his soaked robes lathered in suds.  

     "Everyone having fun?" he bellowed over the sounds of unhappy creatures and frustrated students.

     There was a collective groan, which he took as a sign that all was well.  He distributed the potted plants among the clusters of sweating, grumbling pupils, and the sickly-sweet stench of the flowers mingled with the cloying scent of turpentine made them all dizzy.  He picked up a scroll and quill and looked at the calamitous goings-on in beatific happiness.

     After a few minutes of sullen silence, Seamus spoke.  "I'm sorry.  It's just…I'm curious."

     "I know," she snapped.  "You always are."

     In her heart, she knew she was being unfair, but she couldn't feel sorry about it.  She had spent all her patience on Professor McGonagall and Madam Pomfrey; she had none to spare for Seamus.  He was old enough to know that staring was rude, and she was tired of being the silent martyr.  If he wanted to ogle her like she was some freakshow exhibit, then he was going to have to suffer the consequences, even it only happened to be the rough side of her tongue.

     "If you want to know something about me, ask.  Don't just stare like a vacant-eyed idiot," she said when she had bested her temper.

     "Hand me that towel," was the only reply he made.

     She handed him the towel, and he wrapped the shivering Borgergup into it.  The creature huddled in the towel, surveying his tormentors with mournful eyes.  Seamus was careful to avoid looking at her.

     "Does it hurt?" he mumbled.

     "What?"

     "Does it hurt?"

     "Sometimes."

     "Are you going to die?"

     "Not anytime soon."

     "Ok," he said, as if this settled some great inner debate, and he lapsed into silence again.

     Hagrid, meanwhile, was moving about the enclosure, praising each group's work with the Borgergup and asking each pair a question.  Whatever the answer to the question, he scrawled it down on his parchment and moved on to the next pair.  Rebecca did not fail to notice that he spent an inordinately long time that included Ron Weasley and the boy who could only be Harry Potter.

     The American Wizarding community had been insulated, yes, but even it could not remain ignorant of the events involving Lord Voldemort and The Boy Who Lived.  The downfall of the Dark Lord and his minions had made the front headlines of every wizarding paper in the world.  Therefore, it had come as no great surprise when the admission of the famous Harry Potter to Hogwarts had done the same.  The boy was deified.

     _I always knew he would be pampered and extolled beyond all reason, she thought._

     The moment she had seen the boy with the round black spectacles, untidy black hair, and pale, pinched face, she had known that he would be pampered, revered, and protected.  How could he not be?  Such a tragic past.  Poor orphan boy with no family to call his own?  Then the wizarding world would become his family.  They would love him and mother him and take him to their bosoms.  No blight could touch the boy who had already suffered so much.  The one who had saved them all could commit no sin.  She had thought these things from seeing a single moving picture, and now she could see the proof of it with her own eyes.  A cold smirk, one more at home on Draco Malfoy, crossed her face.

     "Seamus," she said, "listen.  I'm sorry, but I just get so tired of being stared at.  It makes me angry and defensive.  What say we start over?"  She held out her hand.

     He took it.  "All right."

     Hagrid appeared with his quill and parchment.  "Fine job with the Borgergup!  Ten points to Gryffindor.  Are you enjoyin' the class, all righ', Rebecca?"

     "Yes, sir."  She smiled.  Hagrid's enthusiasm was infectious.

     "Marvelous," he said, and clapped her on the shoulder so hard that she toppled over, striking her thin forearm against the rough stone where Seamus had been sick.  

     "Oh, good heavens," he cried in alarm, "I'm sorry!"

     "It's quite all right, sir," she assured him, trying to ignore the bright, throbbing pain in her arm.  "Do you think you could pick me up and put me in my chair?"

     "Wha'?  Oh, occourse…occourse."

     He reached out a mammoth hand and scooped her up, holding her as easily as if she were made of paper.  With a gentle plop, he placed her in her chair, careful not to graze her legs against the fence.  He fussed over her clothes, dusting them off and straightening them.  He was all round-eyed, solicitous concern, and Rebecca couldn't help but feel a pang of sympathy for him.  The poor man was beside himself.

     "All right now?  How's your hand?" he asked, giving her robes a last smoothing.  "I didn't hurt you, did I?"

     "I'm OK, sir.  Really," she said, though her arm was still throbbing.  She surreptitiously flexed her fingers inside the folds of her robe in an attempt to quell the rising tide of muscle spasms.

     "Maybe you should go see Madam Pomfrey."

     "Maybe I will," she said, not intending to at all.  

     "Good, good.  Oh, before I forget, what do you want to call your Borgergup?"

     "A miserable, filthy little hairball?" offered Seamus.

     "Now Seamus, it's not so bad.  Just got a little excited, that's all," said Hagrid, quill poised above the parchment.

     Rebecca thought for a moment.  "How about Mischief?  He's certainly made enough of that today."

     "Any objection to that, Seamus?" asked Hagrid.  When Seamus offered no objection, he scribbled the name down.  "It's settled, then.  Mischief it is.  Mind, Rebecca, you have that arm seen to."

     "Yes, sir."

     He turned his attention to the class, already huddled near the door.  "Dismissed."

     Rebecca doubted if angry Hippogriffs could have run faster.

     The other Houses gave them a wide berth upon their return to the castle.  The thick, sulphurous reek of turpentine clung to them like oil, and the more fortunate pupils pinched their noses as they passed.  Even the portraits wrinkled their noses in distaste.  Draco Malfoy, loitering lazily in the Entrance Hall, coughed and wheezed dramatically, but said nothing.  Apparently, he only taunted when the odds were in his favor.

     Bringing up the rear, her wheels scraping a fine mist of dust from the ancient stairs as she skimmed over them, Rebecca stifled a groan.  The cramps in her arm were definitely worsening.  What had begun as a low throb was now a razor-sharp pickaxe slicing into her flesh just below the elbow.  She was damned if she'd go to the Hospital Wing, though.  After their less-than-friendly meeting this morning in the Headmaster's office, Madam Pomfrey might decide to repay her for her insolence.  The cramps would have to ease on their own.

     When the rest of her House-mates had filed through the portrait hole into the Common Room, she stopped at the entrance and pulled out her wand.  As it was, the doorway was too small to allow her pass.  The evidence of her first failed attempt still remained in the form of matching gouge marks on either side of the doorway where the back wheels had gotten stuck.  Fred and George had gotten her loose after a great deal of tugging and cursing.  Looking at the marks made her feel guilty.  This entrance had stood unblemished for a thousand years, and now it had been scarred because of her.

     "_Augeo foris!" she commanded, and the doorway widened, allowing the fat rear wheels to cross the threshold.  As soon as she was inside, she muttered a quick Deflating Charm, and the door returned to normal._

     The Common Room was empty; her House-mates had lost no time in heading for the showers.  She would just have to wait her turn and hope there was still some hot water left by the time she got there.  There was no guarantee she'd be able to shower anyway.  One look at the antiquated, gorgeous, and utterly impractical bathroom fixtures had told her she would never be able to bathe herself.  The tub was incredibly deep.  Even if she could get herself in, she wouldn't be able to get herself out.  Worse yet, there was a real possibility that she could slide beneath the water while trying to reach the eternally filthy spot between her shoulder blades and drown with the promise of blessed air an inch from her face.  She hoped the house elf the Headmaster had promised would arrive soon.  If she had to go another day without bathing, even the Borgergups would begin to disdain her company.

     She rolled into the girls' dormitory and stopped, a relieved smile on her face.  There, perched solemnly on her bed, was a female house elf wearing a starched white cap and a powder-blue dress.  Her large brown eyes brightened when she saw Rebecca.

     "Is you Rebecca?" she asked, hopping off the bed and coming to the side of the chair.

     "Yes.  You're the house elf the Headmaster sent to help me?  I wasn't expecting you until after supper."

     The elf nodded vigorously.  "I is Winky. Professor Dumbledore says I should help you with whatever you needs doing.  Can Winky help you now?"

     "Well, actually, yes.  I need a bath."

     Winky's nose crinkled.  "Merlin, yes!  Winky was not going to say so because Winky is a polite elf, but miss definitely needs a good scrub!"  

     Rebecca burst into surprised laughter.  Winky was certainly a frank little creature, a pleasant change from the furtive, shifty-eyed politeness she had encountered so far.  She had a feeling that she and Winky were going to get along very well.

     "I hope we can be friends, Winky," she said, suddenly feeling very shy.  

     Winky's ears perked up, and from the expression of sublime ecstasy on her face, one would have thought every Christmas she would ever have had come at once.  "Oh, Winky would like that very much.  She has been so lonely since her family is being gone."  Her expression fell.

     "You had a family?"

     For a moment, the little elf looked on the verge of tears.  "Yes, but I is not wanting to talk about that," she said, her lips trembling ever so slightly.

     "Oh, Winky, I'm sorry.  I didn't mean-,"

     "It's all right, miss.  You is not knowing."

     Rebecca groped for a change of subject.  "Erm, will you be staying with me?"

     Winky's eyes cleared.  "Oh, yes.  Dumbledore told her to stay here with you."  She gestured to a miniature Hogwarts bed tucked discreetly in the corner of the room.  "If you is needing her anytime during morning or night, you just says her name, and she will come.  If you need her in the corridors, just call.  But Headmaster says I is not allowed to help Miss with homework."

     Rebecca giggled.  A weight she hadn't know was there had suddenly rolled from her chest.  Now the world did not seem quite as daunting.  She would have a friend to help her through the rough spots.  She suddenly felt like singing.

     As soon as a tub became available, Winky swung into action.  Before the steam from the last bath had dissipated, she had begun to fill the tub again.  The water had scarcely splashed into the tub when she picked Rebecca up and floated her into thebathroom, holding her above her head like a trophy. Less than a minute after that, she had stripped her naked and placed her in the steaming water.

     Rebecca nearly purred with pleasure as the elf scrubbed energetically at her arms and back.  She could feel the stink and the dead skin sloughing off, and it was heavenly.  She would gladly stay in the tub for the rest of the day.  The warm water eased her cramping arm muscles, and the feel of the elf's strong fingers massaging shampoo into her scalp made her limp with contentment.  Life was sweet.

     "Miss isn't to feel shy about letting Winky see her.  Winky saw plenty of naked people last year at the end-of-term staff party," she said.  "No clothes doesn't bother her."

     She thought about pursuing this odd statement, but decided against it.  It was none of her business.  "Ok."

      "Does Miss want to wash, or should I?" Winky asked, holding out the soap in one long-fingered hand.

     For a moment, Rebecca wasn't sure what she was talking about, then understanding dawned on her face and color bloomed on her cheeks.  "Oh, I'll do it."

     Seven minutes after that, she was washed, dried, clothed in fresh robes, and headed down to the Great Hall for lunch.  By the time she returned to the Gryffindor Common Room later that night, full of sumptuous victuals and chilled pumpkin juice, her thoughts were consumed with the wondrous things she had seen and done, and she smiled drowsily as she considered that this was only the first day of what promised to be a fascinating, eventful year.  

     Winky tucked her into bed, and she drifted to sleep, unaware that the following day she would meet the man who would change her life and destiny forever. 


	4. First Strike

Chapter Four

     If Rebecca bore any naïve hope that queasy-stomached Borgergups would be the worst obstacle she would have to face at Hogwarts that year, it was swept away the instant she stepped into the shadowy Potions classroom the following afternoon.  The professor, a tall, sallow man with lank black hair, was standing by his desk, watching his charges enter with an expression of bored disdain.  At the soft whirr of her chair, his head snapped in her direction.

     He was remarkably quick.  That was the only thought she had time for before he was looming in front of her, cloak rippling around his ankles.  He glared down at her, arms folded across his chest.  A wrinkled parchment was clutched in his right hand.

     "Good morning, Miss Stanhope," he murmured, though from his tone it was clear he saw nothing good about it.

     She was so surprised that she was at a loss for words.  She craned her neck to look at him.  His face was an inscrutable mask, but his eyes were glittering with anger, and she felt the pit of her stomach drop into her knees.  This was not going to turn out well.  She swallowed a lump of unease and spoke, trying to keep her voice steady.  

     "Good morning, Professor Sn…"  She trailed off.  In her consternation, she had forgotten his name.  It was the last time she would ever make that mistake.

     "Snape," he hissed through gritted teeth.  "Professor Snape."  Then he was crouched in front of her, turning the rumpled parchment in his hands.  His black eyes bored into her wide, uncertain blue ones.  "Do you happen to know what this is?" he asked, eyes darting momentarily to the paper before fastening onto her again.

     "No, sir," she managed, knowing as soon as the words left her mouth that it was the worst answer she could possibly have given.  Her fingers clamped convulsively around the rim of her cauldron, making it squeak.

     "No?"  A malicious smile played around the corners of his mouth.  "This," he said, standing up and turning to address the class, "is a list of the accommodations you require in order to participate in this class.  Professor McGonagall delivered it to me just this morning.  Tell me, Miss Stanhope, do you think yourself special?"  His voice was a wicked silken purr, and he turned his bottomless eyes to her in mute, vicious glee.

     "No, sir."  She could feel the first beads of sweat popping out on her forehead.  The malevolence and loathing were radiating from him in staggering waves, and she fought hard against the urge to flinch.

     "Then why do you insist on asking for things no other student has access to?"

     "Sir, they're just things to help me do as well in everyone else."

     He lunged toward her so quickly that she did recoil then, pulling as far back from his unyielding face as she could.  Her cauldron rattled dangerously in her lap.  "If you cannot do the same work with the same equipment as everyone else, then you do not deserve to be here.  Go back to wherever you came from and refrain from dragging the rest of these sorry pupils with you.  I am not a nursemaid.  I have no patience with the Headmaster's latest charity case.  I am not going to waste my time chasing after an oversized, enchanted cutting knife, a control beaker, or anything else on this pretentious little list of yours.  Is that clear?"  His face was now so close to her own that she could see the individual pores of his skin.

     "Yes, sir," she croaked, too stunned to react in any other manner.

     "Good.  Very good.  Now get to your seat.  You've wasted more than enough of my time already.  And if you even think about pulling out that Dicta-Quill of yours, you'll be in detention for the rest of your life."  He flashed her a lopsided smirk.  "Oh, and one more thing," he purred, his breath tickling her ear, "five points from Gryffindor for being in my presence, another five for forgetting my name, and ten for being unprepared.  If you are not in your seat by the time I reach my lectern, it'll be twenty."  He straightened and whirled toward his desk.

     Rebecca tried, but it was no contest.  He was two steps away from his goal; she had half the distance of the room to traverse to reach her desk.  Her chair had just lurched into motion when his nightshade voice cut the silence of the room like a rapier.

     "Twenty."  It held a note of smug triumph. 

     She retreated to her desk in a daze, pulling her chair alongside the first empty seat.  Never had she encountered such overt and unrepentant hostility from a teacher.  All her life, teachers had been her protectors, her advocates.  This was a new, and dangerous, phenomenon.  A hateful peer was relatively easy to counteract.  If their petty cruelty was ignored long enough, they usually went off in search of new quarry.  A teacher, though, was an entirely different matter.  A teacher did not have to limit their cruelty to tart barbs or tasteless pranks; with a scratch of a quill, they could demolish academic futures.  Professor Snape could, and probably would, ruin all her dreams with a single scribble of ink.

     "Today," began Snape with considerably more vigor and enthusiasm than he had shown in quite some time, "we will be brewing the Camoflous Draught.  When brewed properly, it can be used to conceal the drinker in broad daylight.  They can stand a mere hairbreadth away from someone and never be seen.  The list of ingredients is rather complex, and I don't expect that many of you will be competent enough to do it properly.  Actually, I anticipate that most of my Anti-Ache powder will be gone by the end of the session."  Here he spared Rebecca a terrible glare.  "However, despite my annual protests, the Headmaster is adamant that I teach you."  He turned toward the blackboard and began to write out the lengthy list of ingredients.

     There was a dry rustle of parchment as students began scribbling furious notes.  Barred from using the Dicta-quill, she could only watch as Snape's lily, long-fingered hand glided across the board, tapping out the secrets of the world in staccato rhythm and white dust.  Every movement he made was a testimony to cold efficiency, and looking at his ramrod-straight, narrow back, she felt a shiver of fear.  He was a man without mercy, and any minute now he was going to turn around and see her not writing anything down.

     Sure enough, as though he had read the thought, his hand paused in its mesmerizing flow, and he turned to look at her.  The cauldron on her lap was jangling like a doomsday bell.

     "Miss Stanhope, why are you not copying these ingredients down?  All of your classmates seem to be able to manage."  His voice was quiet thunder.  

     "Well, sir," she said, hating the tremulous squeak in her voice but powerless to control it, "the only quill I have is the Dicta-Quill, and you told me not to use it."

     "Don't be impertinent," he snapped.  "Five points for your cheek.  Use that muddled head of yours and borrow one."  Someone on the Slytherin side giggled.  Snape watched her impassively.

     She risked a quick glance around the room.  Most of her classmates were intent on studying the fine grain of the wood used in their desks.  A few shot her sympathetic glances, but none dared to raise their head.  Potter and his group were glaring at her smirking tormentor, but they uttered not a syllable in her defense.  They already knew what she was fast learning.  It was a futile cause.

     No one made a sound for a full minute.  Her hands were sweating so badly that the small pewter cauldron was slipping from her grasp.  It clanked loudly against the metal clasp of her seat belt.

     "Stop that incessant rattling!" he roared.

     His voice was so loud after the previous quiet that she was startled into a vicious spasm.  Her leg shot out and kicked the desk in front of her, eliciting a startled screech from the occupant, an Indian girl who spared her an offended sniff.  Worse yet, the cauldron slithered from her grasp and clattered to the floor with a jarring _ka-bong._  It rolled to a stop at Professor Snape's feet.

     Another spasm gripped her, this time tearing through her left arm, bringing it to her chest in a violent whipsaw.  She gritted her teeth against the tight, sizzling pain.  There was a sharp prick on her left arm, and she turned to see Neville Longbottom holding out an owl quill and inkwell to her with jittering hands.  His eyes were round as dinner plates, and his skin was waxy with terror.

     _He feels the same way I do about Snape, _she realized as another cramp lanced through her forearm, making her give a soft gasp.

     "Ah, Mr. Longbottom has come to your rescue.  I should have known the two of you would get on," Snape sneered.  "Well, what are you waiting for, girl?  Take them."

     She forced her rigid, clenching arm to extend, pale, cold fingers snapping closed around the slender shaft of the quill.  _Please, Merlin, don't let it break, _she thought.  Her hand was trembling and cramping so badly that the quill was convulsing erratically, scribbling against the air.  She dropped it onto the desk and flexed her fingers in the hope it would calm the tremors, but it did no good.  The hand trembled just as badly as before, and from the corner of her eye, she saw that Professor Snape was curling his lip impatiently.  The hand darted out again and wrapped around the inkwell.  Another spasm ripped her, and she crushed the inkwell between her fingers, slick black ink sloshing onto her wrist.

     "It only took you six minutes to grasp a quill," Snape said in mock admiration.  "By my calculations, it should only take you six months to complete this potion."  He smiled a bloodless smile.  "Pity."

     It was clear from his expression that he was enjoying himself.  His eyes twinkled with black mirth.  Nothing she could say would move him to mercy.  Her chest constricted with fear, confusion, and low-grade panic.  There was no way out of this.  He hated her simply because of the way she was.  She could not change herself, and she was certain he would never change his mind.  They had reached an impasse.  Silently, staring up at his cadaverous face, she considered her options.

     She could break under his fierce, unrelenting lash, as he no doubt hoped she would, or she could stiffen her spine and endure him.  The first was by far the easiest option.  She was beginning to crack already, and she had a sneaking suspicion that he had not even begun to bring the full extent of his cruelty to bear.  Her hands shook, her teeth clicked together, and the hot scald of threatening tears needled her eyes.

     _Can I survive a year like this?_  The thought resonated in her mind.  She had survived every conceivable cruelty life had ever thrown in her path thus far, besting them with steel-jawed indifference, but this was something outside her scope of experience.  She could not combat his venom as she had Malfoy.  He was not some haughty, sniveling, spoiled child strutting and preening his way through life by bullying others.  He was an adult, an adult in position of authority, and if she tried to deflect his torment with her usual defense of sarcastic wit, he would crush her beneath her heel.  His wit far outmatched her own, and his cruelty was eroding her carefully constructed defenses faster than she could shore them up.  She would be lucky to survive the class.

     _Do you want to go back to D.A.I.M.S.?_

The thought was like a sharp blow to her heart.  D.A.I.M.S., with its antiseptic walls and stone-faced, white-smocked nurses was a tomb, a crypt where the souls withered before the bodies gave out.  She had seen it with her own eyes.  Students came in, suffering but bright, eager to hone their skills as best they could.  They left dull-eyed and disillusioned, settling for menial jobs in obscure little shoppes or submitting meekly to the regimented schedule of life in an institution.  If she went back there, her spirit would be broken just like the others.  It might take months or years, but it would happen.  Better to take her chances here with this vituperative, irritable bastard than succumb to the vampiric monotony of life back home.

     Having come to a decision did not lessen her fear of the glowering figure before her.  Her hands shook in her lap, and her heart thudded painfully against her ribcage.  Her mouth was desert dry, and she scraped her tongue along the roof of her mouth to moisten it.  It was sandpaper against granite, and she soon gave it up.

     "Pick up your cauldron, Miss Stanhope, and do it quickly.  If you take longer than thirty seconds, you will regret it."  He said this almost cheerfully.

     She reached inside her robe for her wand, but his voice froze her with a sinister hiss.  "No wand."  There was a muffled groan from the Gryffindor side of the room.  They were anticipating a long battle and a crushing loss of points that would likely drop them from contention for the House Cup.  The Slytherins sniggered behind their hands.  Everyone in the room was aware of the outcome before the battle had even been waged.

     Rebecca rolled toward the cauldron at the scowling professor's feet, furious because they were right.  There was no way that she would be able to retrieve the cauldron in the allotted time.  Even totally calm, she would have been hard pressed, and after the very public excoriation she had received, serenity was the furthest thing from her mind.  The class was silent except for the nervous tapping of quill shafts upon desktops and a smattering of jubilant titters.  Professor Snape watched her approach without comment, his hands resting lightly upon the lectern.

     She brought the chair to a stop less than an inch from his feet.  This close to him, she could smell his scent, a dry mixture of allspice and yellowing parchment dust.  It was not entirely unpleasant; he most certainly did not smell of turpentine as Longbottom had suggested.  He stared down his long, crooked nose at her, his thin lips pressed in a flat, unforgiving line.  His eyes held cool amusement and haughty challenge.  They were extraordinarily beautiful, out of place on his bland, icy face.  _Like the eyes of an adder just before it moves in for the kill,_ she thought uneasily, and blinked.  She was wasting time.

     She leaned down and reached for the cauldron, bright in the shadowy darkness, and her fingers brushed the hem of his robe.  He hissed behind his teeth, flinching from the contact.  She recoiled as though electrocuted.

     "Ten points for touching me," he said calmly, making no move to step back and give her room to work.  "You have fifteen seconds."

     She bit back a scathing reply, knowing that if it passed her lips it would cost her and the rest of Gryffindor dearly.  No use giving him anymore satisfaction than he had already gotten.  Her fingers grazed the gritty copper surface, but the thin wire handle remained just out of reach.  She bent farther, bony knees jabbing into her scrawny chest.  Her back gave a sharp warning twinge.  Still the handle eluded her.  Another back spasm clutched at her, this one forcing a small, muffled cry from behind her closed lips.  Some of the students shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

     "Time is up, Miss Stanhope," he snapped.  "One point, two point, three…"

     Her back was screaming now, the cramps coming in unceasing waves.  A panicked whine escaped her throat.  Each second cost her a point, and the pain was nearly blinding.  It was getting harder and harder to retain control of her limbs, but if she didn't get her cauldron very soon, Gryffindor was going to be more than one hundred points in the negative.  

     Snape had reached twenty in his methodical count.  She pushed off against her footrest, stretching her back to its absolute limit.  She heard her vertebrae pop and crackle with the effort, a huge, convulsive spasm momentarily blotting out rational thought.  Despite her best intentions not to show weakness in front of her peers, she screamed, a high, reedy sound, and then mercifully she felt the cool tingle of the copper handle on her fingertips.  She jerked it to her and sat up, gasping against the searing agony still echoing through her bones.

     Save for her ragged, anguished whooping, the room was utterly silent.  Even the formerly raucous Slytherins had gone still.  Accustomed to their Head of House's wanton, indiscriminate cruelty, even they were stunned at the lengths to which he had gone to belittle and humiliate her.  Acid barbs and crushing criticism was his usual fare.  None of them had ever seen him physically torment a pupil, and the fact that he had taken this new and drastic step raised unsettling questions in their own minds.  Would he unleash this new cruelty on them as well?  The fun had gone out of the game for most of them.  Only Malfoy and his lackeys could still find any joy in the spectacle.  They sat smirking triumphantly in the back corner.

     "Good work, Professor," crowed Malfoy, confident there would be no rebuke.

     In truth, the Slytherins needn't have worried.  Severus Snape had not decided to expand his repertoire of sadisms.  He simply wanted to see how far he could push the pathetic bundle of bones known as Rebecca Stanhope before she collapsed.  Frankly, he was a bit surprised she hadn't yet.  Most students would have been a blubbering, insensible heap by now.  Then again, she had been dealt a harder lot than most.  It was only a matter of time before she broke.  The cracks were already forming; he could see them winnowing behind her eyes like blight.  

     "Your ineptitude has cost your House another forty points," he said casually, watching for the spark of miserable outrage to flare in her eyes as it had in so many others.  

     There was nothing in her eyes-no hatred, no confusion, no fear-just an opaque blankness, like soaped-over windows.  So, she was putting up her defenses, walling up her seething emotions.  He knew about such protective measures.  He'd used them successfully for many years.  And he knew how to break them.  Break them he would.  He would have her begging for that squalid little school she had come from in three days.

     "Now that you have your list of ingredients, you have three minutes to collect them and return to your seat.  I need not remind you of the consequence for tardiness."

     He watched the students file from their seats to the neatly organized storage closet that held all his stores.  He kept a particularly close eye on Rebecca, noticing she kept well back from the other students, afraid perhaps that she would jostle them with that improbable and likely dangerous contraption of hers.  Unlike the others, who had left their cauldrons neatly on their desks, she still clutched hers in one frail hand, like a talisman against his rage.

     His gaze followed her as she moved hesitantly to the shelves, eyes searching the labels for the necessary items.  A timid hand reached up to grasp a vial of powdered dung beetle mandibles.  _If she drops one single vial, so help me, I'll penalize her so severely Gryffindor will be working to clear the deficit for the next three hundred years, _he thought savagely, all the while hoping she would do exactly that.  Anything to further humiliate her.  If she lost enough points, eventually McGonagall would notice.  Notice and complain.  The success of Gryffindor was of paramount importance to her, and she would take whatever steps necessary to preserve its dignity, even voice her opinions against this strange, ugly girl.  And if two Heads of House complained about the detrimental effect she was having on student morale, then the Headmaster would have no choice but to dismiss her.

     Regrettably, she did not drop the powdered dung beetle mandibles, nor did the mucus of toad slip.  The crushed poppy wobbled precariously for an instant, but she managed to steady it.  He felt a grudging stab of admiration as he realized she was using the cauldron to carry the various nostrums.  Clever; it showed she wasn't a complete boob.  He gave an irritable snort.  That changed nothing.  She didn't belong here, and he was going to prove it.

     A self-satisfied smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.  It seemed Miss Stanhope had run into a bit of a conundrum.  Oh dear, the minced rosehip was on the highest shelf. Much too high for her.  Unless, of course, she stood up, and alas, that was one feat she most certainly could not accomplish.  He checked the hourglass on the farthest edge of his desk and was pleased to see that less than forty-five seconds were left before the punishment could begin.  He counted of the seconds with relish.  Forty.  Thirty-five.  It was going to be his first hundred-plus point deduction day in fifteen years.

     Just then Neville Longbottom, the boy personally responsible for tripling the yearly Potions budget through his mind-numbing, wanton destruction of cauldrons, ruined everything.  Finished gathering his own provisions, the feckless clod reached up and retrieved the rosehip, handing it to the pitifully grateful Stanhope with a courteous smile.  Not only that, but the do-gooding meddler collected the remaining ingredients and put them in her cauldron.

     Furious at having been stripped of a golden opportunity to beat his personal best point-shaving record, he favored Longbottom with a withering glare and was most gratified to see him quail and flinch beneath his gaze.  He retreated to his seat, thoroughly cowed and probably hoping that would be the worst of his punishment.  He should have known better.

     Stanhope, too, spared him a glance, but his was disappointed to detect no noticeable fear, only that same guarded, emotionless look.  He would have been surprised indeed if he had known that it was the very countenance he himself assumed when in the presence of others, but he had not looked into a mirror in seventeen years and knew nothing of the striking resemblance between tormentor and the tormented.  He suppressed an exasperated hiss when he realized his quarry was going to escape to her seat unscathed.  His already abysmal mood worsened.

     "Congratulations, you've finally managed to do something right for a change."  He applauded slowly, willing her to wilt.  Her cheeks flushed scarlet and her mouth worked, but she did not burst into hysterical, keening wails.  He saw the first flickers of hatred, though, and that was good.  That meant he was getting beneath her skin, and once he was inside her mind, he could do anything he wished.

    He bestowed the class with a disgusted scowl, and as they had always done, they averted their eyes to the parchment on their desks or a spot on the blackboard.  He watched Stanhope grapple with her borrowed quill, stiff, clawed hands tearing the gossamer feather as she fought to hold it perpendicular.  He bit back a groan.  The girl was hopeless, and Albus had lost his mind.  

     He began the lecture on the proper preparation of the potion, ignoring the notes he held in one hand in favor of his unsurpassed memory.  After seventeen years, he could recite the directions by rote.  Forty heads bent over parchment.  He risked a sidelong glance at Stanhope's progress and was mortified to see an indecipherable mass of jerky scrawls and blossoming inkblots.  He thought he saw an _r_, or maybe it was an _n_.  Her hand jerked, and the quill slashed angrily, leaving a jagged, runny line.

     _Morgan's scepter!  If I have to read that drivel every day, I'll be as blind as Moody by the middle of the term, _he thought incredulously.  Indignation swelled in him.  That was enough.  He was not going to tolerate this nonsense one moment longer.  He broke off his lecture in mid-sentence and strode to her desk, ripping the parchment from beneath the sporadically moving quill.

     "What is this?" he hissed, giving the paper a contemptuous glance.  "Do you expect me to read this?  This is not Divination, Miss Stanhope."

      Her breathing quickened.  "My hands are too stiff to write properly, sir.  If I am not allowed to use the Dicta-Quill, that is what everything is going to look like.  It's the best I can do."

     "Then I suggest you improve.  Quickly.  If I see anything remotely resembling this travesty cross my desk, we will be paying a visit to the Headmaster's office."

     "The only way to avoid that, sir, is to let me use the Dicta-Quill," she said quietly.

     "I did not ask for your opinion, nor do I appreciate your insolence.  Fifty points."  There was an astonished, horrified gasp from the Gryffindors.  "I think it's no secret that that I'm not terribly fond of you.  In fact, I despise you.  You don't belong here.  It's only because of the Headmaster's misguided charity that you are here."

     He knew instantly that he had struck a very raw nerve.  Her face, that up until then had been a mask of rigid self-control, crumpled.  Her chest began to hitch, and the fever-bright shine of impending tears was in her eyes.  He felt a sudden thrill of victory.

     "What's the matter, Miss Stanhope," he said in feigned sympathy, "have I destroyed your little fantasy world with the unpleasant truth?  Did you really think you were invited to Hogwarts based on your academic merit?"  He laughed, a cold, cruel sound.  "I regret to inform you that our esteemed Headmaster has a history of taking in the unwanted outcasts of others.  Our Groundskeeper, Hagrid, is one such example."

     There was muffled shout of outrage from Potter's entourage, but Snape could have cared less.  It was two birds with one stone as far as he was concerned.  He was pleased to hear the low beginnings of a miserable wail from deep within Stanhope's throat.  It was music to his ears.  He'd heard it often throughout the years; he was not selective about whom he cut with his serrated tongue.  A singularly stupid Muggle Studies teacher had once fled his office in tears after making an innocent query about his grading methods.  As far as the world knew-and he was quite content to let them think so-he hated everyone with equal fervor.  It was an idea not far from the truth.  He did not suffer fools, and very few had ever managed to be exempted from that category.

     He waited, but the expected bout of incoherent blubbering never materialized.  She took a huge, gulping breath, choking back the sob that was struggling to find its way from her throat.  Her glottis bobbed and clenched as she swallowed.  Then she looked up at him, her face pinched and haggard.

     "I'm sorry, sir," she said, and though there were tears coursing down her cheeks, her voice was steady.  

     This was not the response he had hoped for, but he responded as though it was.  "As well you should be.  I've never had a more inept pupil in all my years, including Mr. Longbottom," he spat, sending an evil sneer in Neville's direction and causing him to whiten most satisfactorily.  

     He returned to his lectern to finish the lecture, his jaw set in a hard line.  She had almost buckled, but at the last moment she had rallied.  Why?  It infuriated him that someone so physically weak should resist him.  It shouldn't be.  Throughout his life, he had reduced Aurors trained to withstand his practiced vitriol into gibbering, weeping wrecks of humanity; this chit of a girl should have collapsed under his weight like softened candle wax.  Her resistance only strengthened his resolve that she would weep before him ere the term was out.

     By the time he had finished his lecture, she was all he could see, her hunched, crab-like form baiting him with its vulnerability.  She worked ponderously, slowly, and without conviction as she started to prepare her ingredients as per his instructions.  She never met his gaze, though he was sure she was aware of his attention.  Her head tucked against her chest as she laboriously chopped her jackal meat, the slender cutting knife held awkwardly in her right hand.  She was hacking more than chopping, the knife strokes wide and arrhythmic.  He entertained the idea of dressing her down for dangerous knife handling, but decided it would be unwise.  If he startled her and she managed to slice her fingers off, there would be an inquiry, and Dumbledore would take him to task.  Not to mention the fact that it would reflect badly on him as a teacher.  He had always prided himself on keeping his students safe, regardless of their own idiocy.

     He pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers.  Watching her contortions was giving him a pounding headache.  He could see from here that her meat was too unevenly chopped.  The ragged edges would make her mixture far too lumpy and inconsistent.  She seemed not to notice, going busily about her work.  She painstakingly scooped up the pieces up and dropped them into her cauldron.  As she reached across her desk for the vial of powdered dung beetle mandible, her face became a rictus of pain, and she clenched her teeth against a guttural cry.  Several turned to stare, and he saw Longbottom step over to ask if she were all right.  She nodded, and after a moment she resumed her work.

     The spasms she suffered fascinated him.  He supposed anyone else would be moved to compassion by her intermittent writhings, but he had seen and experienced too much to feel anything more than perfunctory interest.  Her periodic twinges could hardly be expected to stir pity in his heart when he himself had had his bones remolded inside his skin by the Cruciatus Curse.  The memory of his last taste of the Cruciatus was still fresh in his mind; two weeks ago it had been.  After fourteen days his skin was still hypersensitive to the touch.

     His fingers subconsciously massaged his forearm, tracing over the dark secret his robes concealed.  It was the reason for his suffering, though he had no one to blame for it but himself.  He had chosen to have it seared into his flesh, and he had likewise chosen his penance.  The Cruciatus Curse was part of that penance.  He grimaced at the memory of the molten agony flooding through his bones like bilious acid.  He had screamed like a child and prayed for it to stop, for this time to be the last time, the knowledge that it wouldn't be needling the base of his brain even as he shrieked to the Fates for mercy.

     _I wonder if Miss Stanhope would be able to defy the Cruciatus like she braves her inconsequential little aches, _he thought bitterly, pausing long enough in his personal ruminations to reprimand an imbecilic boy for mixing in far too much rosehip.

     He hoped he never had to find out the answer to that question.  He hated her, resented her presence in his classroom, and loathed being responsible for her, but he would never wish the unspeakable agony of Cruciatus on anyone, not even a creature as misbegotten as she.  Like it or not, for the time being she was his student, and if something so dire were to befall her, it would mean that he had failed in his foremost duty to Albus Dumbledore and Hogwarts-shielding them from Lord Voldemort.

     This train of thought led him to another revelation.  He would need to exercise a great deal of care in his quest to drive Miss Stanhope from the school.  Being too overt or causing her physical harm during his campaign, intentionally or otherwise, would force Dumbledore to sack him, and if that happened he would be dead within a week.  Voldemort only let him live because he still hoped to gain important information on the movements of the cunning Headmaster; if Albus cut him loose, he would be useless, as useless as Stanhope, and Voldemort would cast him aside as offal.

     There was a loud bang followed by a wet hiss, and he wrenched his eyes away from the sweating visage of Rebecca Stanhope to see Neville Longbottom presiding over yet another calamity.  Some of the other professors found his bumbling endearing, but he did not.  The boy was a menace.  If Miss Stanhope were fortunate enough not to incinerate half of Hogwarts with her clumsy hackings and dribblings, Longbottom would perform the job admirably.

     His frayed nerves snapped, and he stormed from the lectern, a black cloud of impending doom.  Longbottom, seeing the imminent danger, tried to back away, but his feet were held fast by the rapidly hardening glue that had been his Potions assignment.  He still clutched a shard of melted and mangled cauldron in one quivering hand.

     "Curse you, Longbottom!" he spat, towering over his cowering victim in a monolithic fury, his eyes sable fire and as piercing as a sharpened blade as they swept over the ruinous, slimy remnants of Neville's work area.

     "I'm s-s-sorry, P-Professor," he stammered, trying to make himself as small as he could in case Snape decided to put his formidable wand skills into use.

     "Sorry?  I've heard that paltry, meaningless little utterance come out of your mouth far, far too often for it to do any good.  How many cauldrons have you destroyed in this class?  Two hundred?  Three?  Tell me, Longbottom.  I'm most interested in the answer."  His face was mere inches from Longbottom's moon-shaped, pudgy one, and the naked fear he saw there disgusted him.  Spineless, the lot of them.  

     "I don't know, sir," Neville wailed.

     "Why does that not surprise me?  Clean this mess up and stop sniveling.  And wipe that vile green glop off your nose," he hissed.

     He noticed that Miss Stanhope had paused in her work and was watching him with those veiled blue eyes, one hand absently stirring her too-thick brew.  That she should be observing him so unashamedly rather than concentrating on her work rankled him still further, and he rounded on her in one fluid movement.  Does something interest you?" he snarled.

     The hand stopped its languid rotation, and she let the spoon clink against the side of her cauldron.  "Yes, sir."

     "Oh?  Enlighten me."

     She paused for a moment.  "You, sir."  

     It took a moment for him to register exactly what she'd said.  "Don't be impertinent."

     "No, sir."

     "Let's have a look at your potion, shall we?"  He stepped over to her desk 

     Rebecca watched him lean over to inspect her effort.  It was useless, really.  She hadn't even finished the decoction.  Her diced wolverine gallbladder was still sitting on the desk, waiting to be added.  In all the excitement, she never got around to dropping them in, a fact he soon noticed.

     "Your potion is incomplete," he said with grim satisfaction.

     "Yes, sir."

     "Why?"

     She felt a flash of white-hot anger.  He knew damn well why she hadn't been able to finish it.  He had refused to allow her to use any of the specialized equipment she needed, equipment the Headmaster himself had approved.  On top of that, he had spent more than half the class berating and tormenting her and the unfortunate Longbottom.  With all of his hissing, snapping, and muttering, it was a wonder anyone had managed to get anything accomplished at all.

     "With all of the distraction, sir, I was unable to concentrate on my work," she said, opting for the most diplomatically truthful answer she could think of.

     "Stop making excuses."  He opened his mouth to offer another jibe or perhaps deduct more points, but then thought better of it.  "Since you find me so fascinating, you will serve detention with me tonight in the dungeons.  Maybe then you can actually do what is expected of you.  I can promise there will be no distractions."

     There was something ominous in his tone, something that sent another ripple of gooseflesh up her back.  She looked into his tar pit eyes to see if they would reveal anything of what he planned, but she found no clue, only a steely cold that made the spittle in her mouth go dry.

     "Class dismissed," he purred, never taking his eyes off her.  To her he said, "Goodbye, Miss Stanhope; I look forward to seeing you this evening."

     With a lurching twist in her stomach, she saw that he meant it.

     She was three-quarters of the way back to the Gryffindor Common Room when the emotional dam she had built to weather Snape's merciless battery collapsed.  Her hands began to shake, causing her chair to veer into the stone wall.  She made no attempt to reverse; instead she sat with her head resting against the cool stone, salty tears streaming from her eyes.  Her shoulders shook with mute sobs.

      All of the hateful, wounding things Snape said needled into her brain like the throbbing, burning sting of frenzied hornets.  Especially _if you cannot complete the work in the same manner as everyone else, you don't deserve to be here.  _The unmistakable jeer in his voice scalded her soul.  It was the single thought that she had worried over for a week before her arrival, the dark and secret fear that maybe she _wasn't _good enough, that she would get here only to be sent home within days because she was hopeless and useless, everything D.A.I.M.S. made her feel she was.  It was her private fear, and he had exposed it, smelling it the way a lion detects the scent of fresh blood.  

     The anger swept over her again, and she choked back a sob, determined not to draw attention to her private misery.  What right did he have to demean her, to make her feel less than human?  She had not chosen him, nor had she chosen the body she would inhabit.  It wasn't as if she had asked the Fates specifically to be allowed to inconvenience the life of Professor Snape.  Never had she felt so helpless, so powerless.

     _Damn him!  Damn him!!  _The thought cut into her mind, and she beat her hands against the wall in impotent fury.

     "Don't take it so hard," came a voice from behind her.  "He's always an awful git."

     She jerked her head away from the wall and swiped at her face, embarrassed that someone had seen her wallowing in self-pity.  Through her tear-blurred vision, she saw Neville Longbottom standing there, shifting his books from one arm to the other.

     "I'm sorry," she said with a watery sniffle.  "It's just-I've never…," she trailed off.

     I know," Neville said.  "You get used to it.  He's been after me five years now."  

     The idea of anyone surviving five years of such staggering abuse boggled her mind.  "Five years?"

     He nodded glumly.  "Every time I try to brew a potion I blow up a cauldron.  Three cauldrons a week for the past four years.  He hates me."

     "It's not just me?" she asked, her mood lightening.

     "No.  But he was nastier than I've ever seen him before."  

     The slight lift in her spirit evaporated.  "Oh."

     Seeing his mistake, Neville hurried on.  "Listen, don't worry about him.  He'll never change.  You want to go play some Exploding Snap before supper?"

     The faintest of smiles danced across her face.  "I've seen it played, but I've never done it myself."

     Neville looked surprised.  "You haven't?  That's no problem.  I'll teach you."

     She brightened.  "You wouldn't mind?  Sometimes I drop my cards, and it takes a while for me to rearrange them."

     "I don't mind.  You've seen what a klutz I am with Potions."

     "OK," she said happily, all thoughts of Snape's cruelty banished from her mind.

     They set off for Gryffindor Tower.  Neville Longbottom had thwarted Snape again. 


	5. In the Watches of the Night

Chapter Five

     After a pleasant and all too brief few hours learning the fine art of Exploding Snap from Neville Longbottom, Rebecca soon found herself following the craggy, hunched frame of Argus Filch through the cold, dusty, cobwebbed passages that led to the Potions classroom.  It was eerie without the scrape and shuffle of feet and the soft swish of robes.  The silence was broken only by the soft click of her joystick and the whining burr of her chair's motion as she navigated through the dark.

     "Got on the wrong side of Professor Snape, did you?" Filch asked in his nasally rasp.

     "Unfortunately, yes, sir."

     "You've no idea just how unfortunate you are," he answered.  He sounded gleeful, and this did not ease her already jangling nerves in the slightest.  Filch seemed to revel in punishment, and if he was happy about her circumstances, then it was a foregone conclusion that she would be most unhappy by the time Snape allowed her to return to her chambers.

     He stopped in front of the Potions classroom door and raised the lantern he carried to illuminate his ghoulish face.  He favored her with a predatory, unsympathetic grin.  "Here we are.  Enjoy yourself," he cackled, and moved off, muttering happily about the fact that Snape, unlike most of the teachers, still knew how to punish errant students.

     She watched him until he was out of sight, then turned to look warily upon the Potions door.  Here in the dark and silence it wore a sinister aspect it had not possessed earlier.  It seemed to grow and yawn before her eyes, becoming a monstrous, leering mouth that beckoned in dark, irresistible invitation.  She involuntarily moved her chair back a few paces, unnerved.

     _What's the matter with you, girl? _said a gruff, garrulous voice inside her head.  It was the voice of her deceased grandfather, a pragmatic, hard-headed Irishman who saw any flight of imagination as cotton-headed foolishness.  Had he lived to see it, the idea of his only granddaughter attending a school of witchcraft and wizardry would have sent him into paroxysms of affronted horror.  Magic wasn't practical.  He would have protested that a bright girl such as she belonged in a normal school learning normal, _useful_ things like mathematics or chemistry.  Yet it was his voice that had given her the will to endure the Potions Master's cruelty.  The thought of his disapproving face looking down on her as she blubbered and whined in front of her teacher had more power over her than Snape's forked tongue.

     Besides, she knew what was troubling her, and it wasn't the grimy oak door before which she now hesitated.  It was the person behind the door that was making her heart rattle in her chest like a kettledrum and the hair on the nape of her neck to stiffen and tingle.  Snape.  She didn't want to open the door and come face to face with his merciless, cutting tongue again.  Her defenses were strong, tempered as they were by years of ridicule and scathing rejection, but they were not that strong; his tongue was a velvet sledgehammer, and if battered her long enough, the walls of her resistance would crumble like sand.

     _Pretty words_, groused her grandfather in his ghostly speech; _fat lot of good they'll do you with that fellow._

     About that he was quite right.  Snape would flay her alive to the accompaniment of a lively tune if she were as much as half a second late.  She felt her chest tighten with painful tension, and she took a deep, steadying breath to drive it away before it could lay a firm claim.  If he caught her outside his classroom, wheezing in the thrall of an anxiety attack, she would be very sorry indeed.  She raised her hand to knock, drew back, and then rapped on the door as smartly as she dared before her courage failed her.

     "Come."  Brusque.  Brutal.  

     _Saints preserve me_, she prayed, and opened the door.

     He was sitting at his desk, squinting by the faint light of the candelabra behind him and slashing across homework parchment with his harsh quill.  The candle flames flickered and danced across his pallid, pinched face like the nubile, writhing forms of Dark Witches at a midnight Sabbat.  He cut such a solitary, lonely figure there in the puddle of light that she felt a brief moment of empathy for him, her previous antipathy fading in the face of her melancholy.  He looked up as she entered, black eyes reflecting the candlelight.  He glanced at the hourglass on his desk.  When no cutting rebuke came, she assumed she had arrived on time.

     "On time.  More Filch's doing than yours, I venture," he greeted her, confirming her supposition.  "Come in and close the door.  You're letting in a draft."

     "Yes, sir," she answered, trying to keep her tone neutral.  All her goodwill on his behalf had evaporated the moment he opened his mouth.

     "Since you failed to complete your assignment on time, you will complete it here with me.  You will have the same amount of time as your classmates-three minutes to gather your ingredients, and forty-five to brew the potion.  If at the end of that time, you have not succeeded, I will collect everything, and you will start again from scratch.  You will remain here until you produce an acceptable potion.  I can wait all night.  Is that understood?"

     "Yes, sir."

     "One more thing.  All of the ingredients have been restored to their places.  Sadly, Mr. Longbottom is not here to help you."  A brief smile flitted across his face at the thought.  "Any questions?"

     "No, sir."

     "Begin."

     She rolled to the storage closet, struck by a profound sense of déjà vu.  Everything was in the same place it had been earlier, right down to the bottle with the chipped top facing south.  She looked up, knowing already what she would see.  The rosehip gleamed from its space atop the highest shelf, as mocking and cynical as the hand that had crafted it.  She sighed and gathered what she could, settling the heavy bottles inside her cauldron.  She would worry about the rosehip when she came to it.

     When she had managed to gather all of the other vials, she set her cauldron on the floor so it wouldn't slide off her lap while she worked, and studied the rosehip.  The only way to get it would be to stand up and reach for it, and that was as likely to happen as drawing water from the desert.  She cast a discreet glance at Snape and saw that he was standing silently in front of his desk with his arms folded across his chest.  He was so still that she wasn't sure he was even looking at her.

     "Sir, am I correct in assuming that the use of magic is prohibited?" she whispered, feeling it would be inappropriate to disrupt the calm and quiet with her normal speaking voice.

     "Quite."  The answer was a soft susurration, but it carried effortlessly to her ear.

     She nodded imperceptibly.  It was what she had expected.  "Am I free to use whatever implements are at hand in the classroom to complete my work?"

     There was no answer, only a long contemplative silence.  He was no doubt scrutinizing her request for signs of duplicity.  The seconds ticked by with no response, and she stretched forth her hand to try to reach the rosehip even though she knew it hopeless.  The silky rustle of a cloak caught her attention.  She froze, waiting.

     "You may use whatever you wish, so long as it is in this room.  Use it carefully.  Break anything, and you will regret it.  Ninety seconds, Miss Stanhope."

     "Thank you, sir."

     Silence.  She dropped her upraised arm and pivoted her chair away from the shelf.  She knew what she was looking for.  Her large blue eyes scanned the shadowy room, flitting over the vague outlines of silent, sentinel desks and wraith-like glass tubes.  They fell on the ledge below the blackboard, and she felt a smirk surfacing on her lips.  There was the first part of what she needed.

     "Forty-five seconds."

     She barely heard him.  She rolled toward the object in question, the slender wooden pointer stick he and most of the other teachers used, mostly for effect and sometimes to bring it smashing down upon their desks to recapture the wandering attention of their students.  She moved carefully around the brooding hump of his desk, sure that if she upset the contents upon it with an ill-timed nudge, he would swoop down on her like black vengeance and throttle her with his delicate-fingered hands.

     "Touch nothing on my desk," he warned, his voice brittle with threat.

     "Yes, sir."  _Not a terribly trusting fellow, _she thought wryly.  _Bit paranoid._

     _So are you._  She supposed she was.  But she had a right to be.  She had been rejected, isolated, categorized, and shunned since her mother brought her emaciated form home from the hospital in what should have been her burial shroud.  She saw the ugliness and cold brutality of the world in every human face.  What did Snape have to worry about?  He was a skilled Potions Master with a coveted, prestigious position at the best wizarding school in the world.  Judging by the rich fabrics from which he fashioned his clothes, he was comfortably well off.  He had the respect of his contemporaries and students.

     _Respect?  That's fear, child._  Fine.  Fear, then.  Whatever it was and however he came by it, it was power, a level of power about which she could only fantasize.  He was everything she was not-strong, capable, renowned.  As far as she could see, he had no reason to be such a brooding, gloomy soul.

     _He is alone._  Certainly; the way he conducted himself, it was no surprise.  He was insufferable.  Arrogant, overbearing, cold.  Who would want to be around such a man?  If he was annoyed with the insipid idiocy of the human race, he should never have applied for the job of teacher, where intellectual deficiencies were at their most glaring.  He should have chosen a life of boring anonymity.  A life very much like hers.

     _You are alone.  What does that make you?  _She bristled at the thought, hating her grandfather's blunt, logical practicality.  She was nothing like Snape.  She would never use her power to crush the spirits of those beneath her.  Of course, she had no power to abuse, so that was a moot point.  Even if she had been so lucky, she knew too much about the horrors of being under the heel of tyranny to bring it down upon the head of someone else.  At least, so she hoped.

     A flicker of movement caught her eye, and she turned her head to see Snape taking the vials out of her cauldron and putting them back in their places.  "Time is up," he said without looking at her.  He straightened, brushing a stray forelock of greasy black hair from his forehead.  Without a word, he glided to her, plucked the pointer from her fingers, and replaced it on the ledge.  "Begin again."  He spun away from her and resumed his post in the middle of the room.

     She watched him without comment.  Now that she had a plan, she found she wasn't quite so nervous.  He moved with easy, leonine grace, and she thought that perhaps he could have been a dancer.  An image of Snape preening and pirouetting in his conservative attire while scowling at his audience filled her mind, and a small titter escaped her.

     "Do I amuse you?"

     "No, sir," she said quickly, the faint tickling of mirth driven from her like a roundhouse slap by the ice in his voice.  

     "A joke you'd like to share, perhaps?"  One eyebrow rose in dangerously polite inquiry.

     "No, sir."  Although it was cold, sweat prickled on the nape of her neck.  
     "No?  Then get to work.  You're wasting time."

     Her eyes scanned the room in search of the second item she hoped to use to capture the rosehip without causing herself too much pain.  Finally, they lit upon a heap of discarded parchment in the wastebin.  The wheels of her mind began to turn.  "Sir, may I use that parchment?"

     Another contemplative silence.  Then, "As you wish."

     She rolled to the wastebin, leaned over, and pulled it onto her lap with a soft grunt.  It was perfect.  There was more than enough.  She rolled to the desk and put the bin beside the cauldron.  Quickly, mindful that the sand in the hourglass was trickling inexorably away, she retrieved the paper from the wastebin, crumpled it, and jammed it into her cauldron, padding the hard bottom.  She was aware of Snape's pitiless eyes watching her, and she sent a wordless curse in his direction.  Damn him and his loveless, cold stare.

     "Two minutes," came his quiet warning from the cool shadows.

     Damn, but the time seemed to fly when she toiled before his lash.  She wondered for a moment if he had enchanted the hourglass to move faster than it should.  After his initiation by fire this afternoon, she would put nothing past him.  The cauldron didn't look nearly padded enough, but she was running out of both time and paper, so she stuffed one last crumpled wad of parchment inside and rolled to the blackboard.  She grabbed the pointer and headed to the storage cabinet.

     The rosehip gleamed at her in challenge.  She bared her teeth in unconscious defiance; the bottle would not defeat her.  She had roughly ninety seconds to topple it into her cauldron and gather up the stores Snape had replaced.  If she didn't, she would have to collect the wadded papers all over again, a task that promised tedium and pain.  She had to get this right on the first try.  She looked up at her goal, then down at her cauldron, aligning them as best she could.  When she was sure they were in line, she raised her left arm as high as it would go, lessening the gap between the small copper kettle and the winking glass vial.  With her right and steadier hand, she guided the slender pointer behind the rosehip vial, using every ounce of concentration  to avoid sending the adjacent bottles tumbling to the floor in a crystalline, tinkling opera of guaranteed consequences.

     _Please, God,_ she silently begged, and though she had often thought that same fevered phrase when faced with an insurmountable obstacle, never had it been said with such desperation, such need.  She was terrified of Professor Snape.  The thought of what he would do to her should she break a single vial sent a cold, congealed lump of terror into the pit of her stomach like a piece of rancid gristle.  The pointer tickled and jittered against the glass in a soft staccato.  She closed her eyes and tapped the stick against the rosehip, swallowing a roiling spasm of nausea.

     She waited for the explosive crash of shattering glass, but there was nothing but a muted _plop_.  She opened her eyes and saw, to her immense relief that the vial lay cradled in the nest of crumpled parchment, miraculously unbroken.  She let out a breath she had not known she was holding.  There was one hurdle out of the way.  Her relief was short-lived.  A serpentine hiss brushed the back of her head like an accusation.

     "Forty seconds."

     She moved as quickly as she could, hoping that her muscles and jangling nerves would not betray her by seizing up, thereby impeding her already laborious progress.  In her heightened state of awareness, she was certain she could hear the sibilant hiss of the sand as it slithered through the hourglass, conspiring against her with its silent speed.  From Snape there was no sound at all, not even the quiet, rhythmic rasp of indrawn breath.  He seemed a living statue.

     She hurriedly clutched the remaining vials to her sunken chest and whirled around, one eye trained on the traitorous timepiece on the edge of the professor's desk.  Twenty seconds.  She dropped the vials into the cauldron and reached over to the speed control knob of her wheelchair.  She had hoped not to have to increase her speed, afraid that she would damage some of the countless priceless relics in this castle; she saw no choice now.  Snape had forced her hand with his ridiculous demands, demands no one else had ever dare make on her, and she no longer worried about wreaking destruction in his classroom.  Only her fear of him and his scathing wit kept her from ramming into the walls in childish petulance.  She turned the knob as far to the right as it would go.

     She pushed the joystick forward as far as it would go and shot across the room, surprised into exhilaration.  She had forgotten how fast her chair really went.  She smiled as she careened toward her desk, watching Snape scowl at her from the corner of her eye.  She was going to pay for this, but at least she would make it to her seat in the nick of time.

     "Ten points for recklessness," he said when she skidded to a stop.  "Against all odds, you have returned to your seat on time.  You have forty-five minutes."

     Snape turned away from her and settled himself behind his desk.  He still had papers to grade, and this willful little miscreant was not going to disrupt his routine.  He had been grading parchments here after supper since before her unfortunate birth, and he wasn't about to stop now.  He would not mother her through the decoction, no matter how much he wanted to retreat to his chambers and ponder other, graver things.  He waited until he heard the methodical click of her cutting knife as she chopped her jackal meat before he dipped his quill into his inkwell and set to work.

     He looked at the parchment without seeing it, marking the mistakes by instinct.  He didn't need to see it to know it was a mass of pitiful drek.  Everything his students turned in was generally deplorable to the point of unreadability.  Only smug, know-it-all Hermione Granger, the insufferably intelligent Gryffindor fifth-year who spent far too much time with the even more gall-inducing Harry Potter had ever managed to turn in exceptional work, and it pained him mightily to have to give her top marks.  Just once, he longed to slash and mar her homework with his morale-shattering quill, but the opportunity had never presented itself.  Everything with her name on it garnered grudging top marks.  Just considering it made his mouth rise in a reflexive sneer, and he tore into an unsuspecting second-year's essay on the history of the Sleeping Draught with unbridled disdain.

     He supposed there was one other student that did not send him reeling in teeth-gnashing despair with his submitted scribblings, and that was Draco Malfoy.  Aside from Granger, he was the most competent pupil under his tutelage, which was a good thing considering his perilous position.  Lucius Malfoy, Draco's wealthy, influential father, was Lord Voldemort's second-in-command.  If he ever found it necessary to give Draco a failing mark, he could be assured of trouble.  The Malfoys were unaccustomed to failure of any kind, and a poor mark, no matter how well-deserved, would earn Snape a less-than-friendly visit from the elder Malfoy.  By tacit agreement, the Death Eaters looked out for one another, and low marks would be seen as a gauche breach of that implicit compact.

     Thinking of Draco turned his mind to darker, deadlier things, namely his next summons by Voldemort.  It was overdue by several days, and that made him profoundly uneasy.  The Dark Lord was fanatically punctual; latecomers to the meetings of his inner circle paid for their tardiness with a healthy dose of the Cruciatus Curse.  Their screams reverberated throughout the decaying manor where the rejuvenated Voldemort concealed himself.  Sometimes, Snape awoke in the night in a cold sweat, the weeping, groveling screams of tormented Death Eaters echoing in his ears.  Sometimes the screams were his own.

     That the expected summons had not come was an ill omen, indeed.  The annual initiation ceremony was to have been earlier this week, just before the start of the term, but it had never happened.  Lucius, privy to nearly every movement or decision made by his revered Lord, had made no mention of it in his weekly correspondence, correspondence that was promptly burned in his fireplace after being committed to memory.  The Death Eater initiation rites were as much a part of the fall as the vaunted Halloween feast, and its unexplained delay could only mean that greater plans were afoot, plans which could only spell trouble for Hogwarts and the wizarding world in general.

     He pushed a parchment aside and perused the one beneath it, needing only a cursory glance to determine that it was a terrible as he expected it to be.  Satisfied that he was not overlooking a landmark treatise by the next Voltaire, he let his mind drift back to the subject of Voldemort, the Death Eaters, and the postponed initiation ceremony.  He had a pretty good idea of whom the inductees would be this year.  None of them boggled the mind; most of them had been destined for the left-hand path since before the Mediwitch had wiped the afterbirth from their soft, misshapen foreheads.  All of them came from respectable or wealthy Pureblood families-Voldemort would have it no other way.  Any Mudblood foolish enough to seek entrance into his sacred cabal would be slaughtered before their tainted breath could befoul the air he breathed.

     He ticked off the list of definite initiates in his mind-Crabbe, Goyle, Bulstrode, Flint, Parkinson, Delacour, and Malfoy.  He winced at the last.  Draco had always been a brash, haughty, ambitious child, but he had always entertained the feeble and futile hope that the boy's headstrong, cunning nature would lead him to take the harder, better path simply to be arbitrary and unpredictable.  It had not been so.  He had known from the way Lucius had written of his only son in his most recent letter.  _I am most proud of Draco; last night he announced to me his wishes to help restore the wizarding world to its rightful, purified glory.  _He choked back a scoff at the sheer arrogance of that sentence as he wrote a brutal critique of a third-year Hufflepuffs logic in his meticulous flowing script.  Had he ever believed such things?

     His quill paused but a moment in its unceasing trek across the parchment and his eyes narrowed as he considered the thought.  He sifted through the memories in his mind, pausing at some and recoiling from others.  Some were too painful to look upon, and he shunned them like leprous, diseased things.  The quill resumed its fluid, hypnotizing motion.  His past was murky even to him, eroded as it had been by countless bombardments of the Cruciatus Curse and his own desire to suppress it.  It came to vivid life again only in his dreams, and he chose not to remember those.

     Another grating scratch of the quill.  He could answer the question if he really tried.  No, he hadn't really believed that, not deep down in the bone and sinew and viscera that made him.  He had believed in nothing but himself, trusted only his savage intellect and ambitious instinct.  His tenure as a lone outcast at Hogwarts had given him no reason to behave any differently.  But Voldemort had offered him the tools he himself had not possessed-the supreme, unwavering self-confidence, the irresistible magnetism as a leader of men, the righteousness of his vision.  He had been caught up in it as so many others had, intoxicated by the newfound illusion of power he suddenly found thrust into his hands, hands he had bloodied in his ravenous quest to take that which the world had denied him.  He hadn't wanted to purify his world; he'd wanted to punish it.

     He tossed a parchment aside, furious with his thoughts for taking this unwanted turn.  He had several other things to worry about rather than sitting here foraging among the ruins of his ignonimous past; for instance the disquieting postponement of a critical initiation ceremony.  None of the possibilities that presented themselves were good.  Voldemort was likely planning something of a very large scope, and that was bad.  The fact that he had been excluded from the planning of such an undertaking was worse still.  It meant that Voldemort was losing faith in him, and people in whom he lost faith did not survive for long.

     That was not a thought with which he was comfortable, and he tried to banish it, but it refused to go.  He knew what happened to them, the fallen that no longer pleased the whims of the Dark Lord.  They met most tragic ends.  Nasty ends.  Ends like that of poor, unfortunate Collier Greaves, at whose demise he had been present.  Mr. Greaves, a handsome blond youth who had stupidly botched an inconsequential delivery of blighted toad stools to an apothecary, had been forced to watch the murder of his wife and aged, blind mother.  Then, while the tears of his grief were still slick upon his cheeks, Voldemort had calmly removed every scrap of flesh from his face, peeling him like an orange until he was reduced to a grinning, weeping, screaming skull, tears from his lidless eyes dripping onto bloody bone.  Voldemort had let him scream and gibber for forty-five minutes before sedately reaching over to snap his neck with one brutal twist.  That episode had given him nightmare for the next six years.

     He looked down to see an untidy splotch of ink on the parchment he had been grading and shook himself.  What in the devil was the matter with him?  He was going to pieces like a sheltered schoolboy.  Sitting here conjuring up scenarios for his gruesome death and wallowing in the sins of his past would do him no good.  If Voldemort wanted him, Voldemort would have him, one way or another.  He was safe at Hogwarts, but he would eventually be called forth to kneel at the feet of his enemy, kneel and die in screaming indignity while his former comrades looked on with polished marble eyes.

     To distract his mind from its ghoulish wanderings, he glanced up at Rebecca.  Absorbed in her work, she did not see him, her twig fingers grappling ungracefully with her cutting knife.  Though it was impossible to tell from the shadowy distance, he would have wagered a year's salary that the jackal meat was still too raggedly chopped.  The girl was too clumsy to manage such a precise operation.  He watched in disgusted fascination as her frail neck extended slowly forward in a hesitant turtle motion, her sadly striking blue eyes squinting myopically in search of some ingredient or other.  Her eyes relaxed as she found what she was looking for, and a mangled arm lunged dramatically forward to drag it toward her.

     He tried to come up with a reason why Albus had chosen her as a transfer student and couldn't.  Surely there had to have been dozens of other qualified, _normal_ candidates.  Hogwarts was the preeminent wizarding school in the world.  Thousands of requests for transfer had been received and politely declined over the years.  What reason could he possibly have had to take her?  Watching her was surreal; it was like watching an alien creature imitate a human being.

     _But she resisted you, _pointed out a matter-of-fact voice in his head.  _That's more than any of these "normal" children have accomplished, isn't it?_

     She had, at that.  Resisted his well-honed cruelty with the unshakeable stoicism of someone three times her age, a stone rampart standing steadfastly against the maniacal buffeting of the wind.  Those opaque eyes staring back at him had disconcerted him, though he had not let it show.  There had been nothing in them.  The essence of whatever she was had retreated far beyond the scope of her eyes, retreated until there was nothing to be seen but wary, taunting blankness.  After that, she had been out of his reach.

     How?  How could someone so small, so shrunken, so contorted and drawn in on herself, rebuff his vitriol?  It hadn't been without effort.  He had seen the tremendous cost of it in her face, especially at the last, when he had finally struck home by questioning her right to be here, by throwing a pall of doubt over what she very clearly considered an honorable achievement.  He had nearly breached her iron façade then, but at the last instant she had sealed him off, shutting out the effect of what he had said as neatly and quickly as snuffing out a candle.  Irritation bubbled in his blood at the memory of it.

     He studied her.  By the dim light, he could just make out her ravaged, incredible form.  Her flawless golden hair caught the candlelight and refracted it in thousands of brilliant flaxen sparks.  He couldn't make out her face, which was bent over her bubbling cauldron, but he could see the sharp jut of her gaunt, Nordic cheekbones and the wide, pasty plane of her forehead.  The crooked part of her hair revealed a nearly translucent scalp.  The crown of her skull was so thin one concentrated blow would shatter it to pieces.  Still, she had survived fifteen years and was now sitting in his classroom, depriving him of a decent night's sleep.

     He thought of her parents.  What must they have thought when faced with the wet, shivering, puling imp that had made a mockery of all their hopes and dreams?  Had pride turned to frozen horror, or had they clung to the stubborn, blind love all parents held for their children?  He couldn't see how they could have.  She was everything parents prayed not to receive, the antithesis of the rosy, chubby, cherubic brat for whom they hoped.  He wondered if they had ever considered leaving her to the mercy of the Fates, abandoning her on the doorstep of a ramshackle orphanage for some unlucky Samaritan to find.  Had they ever pondered forsaking her at a river's edge in the dead of winter and letting Nature correct its mistake?  Had they thought of drowning her like an unwanted pet?  It might have been a mercy.

     Her blue eyes turned up to his face, a questioning look on her skeletal face.  "Something else about me that you find fascinating, Stanhope?" he sneered.  

     "No, sir."  She looked at him a moment longer, and then her head dropped as she resumed her work.

     Her apparent serenity at his jibe did nothing to assuage his rancor.  He dropped his quill onto the desktop and fixed the top of her head with a black scowl.  "You're inept," he said simply.

     She dropped her rosehip into the cauldron and stirred it a few times.  She was clearly ignoring him.  "Did you hear me, Miss Stanhope?"

     She turned her head slowly, "Yes, sir."

     "Well," he said in growing exasperation, "what do you have to say for yourself?"

     Bony hands grasped the ladle again.  "Nothing, sir."

     "Nothing?"

     "Nothing.  Would it make a difference if I did, sir?"  The ladle clinked solemnly against the cauldron.

     Snape gazed at her a moment longer, caught between fury and incredulity.  _You stubborn strip of a girl!  I'll make you weep if it's the last I ever do,_ he thought fiercely.  Then he picked up his quill and resumed his assault on the confidence of his pupils.

     Rebecca worked quietly, one eye drifting occasionally to the hourglass.  She had ten minutes before he came to ravage her work.  She carefully measured out the powdered dung beetle mandible, stopping just long enough to give the brew a perfunctory stir.  She knew already that this batch was going to fall well short of Snape's expectations.  It was bubbling far too much and developing a thick, glossy skin over its surface, something it was most assuredly not intended to do.  She suspected it had something to do with the uneven cut of her jackal meat.  It was far from uniform, some small and neatly squared, other bits large and jagged.  Had she had her enchanted cutting knife, it would have been a simple matter to correct, but without it the mistake would be repeated again and again.

     She transferred the powdered dung beetle mandible into her mortar, added in an ounce of rabid dog's blood. And began to pound and crush it with short deliberate strokes.  Her mind turned Snape's last remarks over and over in its tireless centrifuge, breaking it down into its component parts.  _What have you to say for yourself?_ he had asked.  Clearly, he wanted a few careless words to slip out, words that would belie her weakness, but what for?  He already knew where her vulnerability lay, as he had so deftly proven with his remark about performing the work in the same manner as everyone else.

     _He wants to hear it from you.  Don't you give him the satisfaction, _whispered her grandfather's gravelly voice.  It was so clear now, even six years after his death.  Well, he needn't worry about that.  She wasn't going to give this miserable tyrant any more of herself than she had to.  She could-_had_ to-keep him at arm's length if it meant she could stay here.  This was a good place, a safe place.  She could learn here if given enough time.  She could make something of herself, and she wasn't going to let _him_ take that all away from her.  She shot an ugly, unobserved glare in his direction and redoubled her efforts with the pestle, determined to succeed.

     She thought of the Headmaster.  He seemed such a kindly, wise man.  Why would he hire a man like Professor Snape, who seemed to have neither patience nor wisdom in dealing with students?  The man was a bully, a personality more suited to that of a jailer than an imparter of knowledge to impressionable young minds.  Even if he were eminently qualified, surely his surly, antagonistic demeanor would have earned him marked reprisal and dismissal by now.  It wasn't as though she were the only pupil he frightened and tormented; the reactions of her classmates this afternoon had shown as much, and Neville had admitted it outright.

     _That's none of your concern.  What is your concern is finishing your work and getting the hell out of here as soon as you can.  _True enough.  Even a generation of students' complaints hadn't sacked him, nothing would, especially not the weak-voiced whining whimpers of a transfer student on the grounds for a mere forty-eight hours.  Besides, it wasn't as if she were about to go running to the Headmaster.  That wouldn't look well at all.  It would make her look weak and unfit, and it would give Snape more venom to hurl at her when the mood took him.  She would deal with him as with everything else-in her own way and in her own time.

     She felt a dark pressure above her and knew that he was standing there, a living darkness, standing there and judging her behind those black satin eyes.  "Time is up," came the voice, a sentence of predetermined doom.

     She sat back from the desk and looked up into flat black pools.  His face loomed out of the gloom like pitiless moon shedding diseased light on tainted ground.  She fought to keep her face expressionless when he gave her a tight, compassionless smile.  He exuded bitterness and wormwood, and being near him made her flesh prickle with nervous energy.

     "Let's see how you've done, shall we?" he said softly, not sounding the slightest bit hopeful.  A delicate, spidery hand materialized from the folds of his robe and floated out to finger the ladle handle.  He leaned down over the cauldron and sniffed, his long, crooked nose twitching delicately.  His face betrayed nothing.  In an instant, he straightened, eyes glittering.  "Unacceptable.  You'll have to do it again."

     She watched as he withdrew his wand and wiped away all the work she had done in the past hour with a thoughtless flick of his wrist.  The potion faded from her cauldron like the last wisps of a mirage, the only evidence that it had ever been at all the faint, lingering odor of scalded rosehip.  The ingredients flew back to the storage shelves, the wadded parchment strewn on the floor unfurled and flew back to the wastebin, and the pointer fled back to its perch on the ledge beneath the blackboard.  She strangled a sigh of frustration, not wanting to let Snape know much he had demoralized her.  She was tired.  It had been a long, strenuous day, and she was not accustomed to such physical exertion.  At D.A.I.M.S., most tasks were completed with magic, from the combing of hair to the lifting of heavy objects.  It was simpler, quicker, and reduced the risk of a student with Muscular Dystrophy collapsing from stress and exhaustion.  The bone-numbing weariness in her bones told her she was treading the very fine line between simple fatigue and serious overexertion.  If she didn't get the potion right this time through, she would never get it.  Her always erratic coordination was deteriorating quickly.  Soon she would be seeing double.

     "Begin again," Snape ordered.  "I trust you know the time limits by now?"

     She nodded and rolled back to the storage closet, gritting her teeth through a spasm that tore at her right wrist.  _Hold yourself together, dammit, _she thought, and once again went about the monotonous task of gathering her weapons against the unreachable rosehip, cataloging every ache and twinge as it came.  Hips groaned as she bent forward to collect the parchment.  Knuckles cracked as fingers wrapped around the pointer stick.  Shoulders throbbed as she raised the cauldron and the stick.  Her jaw ached from clenching as she strained to tap the vial into its cushioned trap.

     This time there was less than one second to spare when she jerked to a stop at her desk, a fact Snape dourly pointed out before letting her set to work.  She set the cauldron down with a heavy thud, too tired now to work daintily.  She was more worried about amputating her own fingers with the cutting knife.  Awake and alert, handling the blade was an awkward and risky proposition, an uneasy truce between frail human body and strong, ravenous steel.  Now with her eyelids drooping and her concentration slipping, there was no guarantee that it would not slip its ill-fitting tether and lunge traitorously at its wielder.

     She forced her irritated eyes to focus while she chopped yet another piece of jackal meat.  Her hand trembled with fatigue, and she paused a moment to let it calm before resuming.  Snape was an idiot for insisting she continue.  The risk of injury was too great.  Professor Kravitz would never have done something like this.  She pressed her lips together in a thin smile at that.  Professor Kravitz was one of the few things she would miss about D.A.I.M.S.  Jovially incompetent, he cheerfully screamed out instructions and encouragement while knives, beakers, and ingredients went sailing through the air.  Eventually, the neighboring professor, the Transfiguration teacher, would stick her head in the door and ask him to quiet down.  He would-for about thirty seconds.  Then the profoundly deaf Potions professor would resume bellowing merrily at the top of his voice.  Granted, no one ever learned much-the potions were childishly simple-but at least they had been safe.

     A loud clop jolted her back to the here and now, and she was dismayed to see that the knife had glanced off the meat and scored a deep groove in the desktop.

     "Something wrong, Miss Stanhope?"  Snape's voice, cold and suspicious.

     "No, sir.  The knife slipped, that's all."

     "See that it doesn't happen again.  We wouldn't want any …accidents."

     She intensified her concentration, angry with herself for having given him another opportunity to chastise her.  If only she weren't so tired.  She blinked, wincing at the irritated scrape of her eyelids against burning, stinging eyes, and tried to focus on the dwindling piece of jackal meat in front of her.  Her hands were wavering badly now, stiff and cramped, unruly and unwieldy from too much toil.  The tendons in her wrists throbbed in strident protest.  The cuts she was making were little more than general tears, and on one particularly erratic pass, she nicked the tip of her index finger, drawing a dewdrop prick of dark, rich blood.  She raised no alarm, fearful of provoking Snape into another litany of cutting jibes.  She worked on, the warm blood pooling beneath her fingertip.

     The knife slipped twice more before his cold shadow fell over her again, and predictably, inevitably, the potion did not meet his approval.  Her hands, wrists, and shoulders sang out in despair even as her lips remained stubbornly silent when he ordered her, in his dead, clinical voice, to start again.  The tears she longed to weep at this injustice festered unseen behind her eyes, held in check by her fierce, unconscious pride.  He was hard, but she would be harder.

     It took her three tries to gather all her materials the third time around.  Her body had long ceased to be an ally in this fight.  Elbow and knee joints cracked and drew in as feeble defense against the growing cold.  Her breath puffed out in a gossamer fog as the curtain of the hours beyond midnight smothered what little heat the slick, cold stones of the dungeon walls had managed to steal from the day.  Always she felt his critical eyes on the bony crown of her head or the gnarled length of her spine.  Watching.  Waiting.

     The work this time was drudgery beyond telling.  Muscles ached and nerve endings sizzled as she forced them through the same tasks they had tried in vain to complete twice before.  Accurate cutting of the meat and other sundries was far out of the question at this point; she focused on not slicing off any of the parts God had seen fit to give her.  As the hour grew later and later, her fumblings grew more pronounced, the blade weaving dangerously above its target.  The thought that Snape knew she was tiring surfaced dismally through the veil of relentless fatigue, but it could do nothing to buoy her badly flagging spirits.

     She barely registered his skulking presence when he came to review her latest offering.  It was a waste of both his time and hers-the potion was a disaster.  The meat had been hacked and mutilated beyond recognition, and the finely measured powders and mucosa had been carelessly tossed into the mixture.  She kneaded her bleary eyes with her knuckles, stifling a yawn as Snape scowled down at her with frosty contempt.

     "This is a disgrace, Miss Stanhope.  Remedial first years could do better.  Do it again."

     She fought to keep her emotions in check.  "I'm sorry, sir.  I'm just a little tired."  She knew she was whining, but she couldn't help it.  It was a losing battle simply to keep her eyes open.  She swiped her hand across her face.

     "Weariness is no excuse for this travesty."  He looked ready to say something else, but then he stopped, and his hand reached out to brush something brusquely from her cheek.  He examined his fingertips closely.  "Are you bleeding?" he snapped.

     She started, momentarily reinvigorated by the acid in his voice.  It was not concern for her well-being that made him ask the question.  She tried to remember if she had cut herself.  Something floated in the back of her mind a moment before she could snatch it from the haze of her drifting thoughts.  She had cut her finger.  It was just a small slice on the tip.  Nothing to be concerned about, really.  She held up her finger.  "Just a small scrape, sir."

     "Ignorant girl!  In this potion, your blood would do little more than render it ineffective.  There are others, however, to which the introduction of blood would be most catastrophic.  Fatal.  Clean up this blood and start again."  With a wave of his wand, everything returned to its place.

     Now struggling just to hold her head up, Rebecca rolled through the motions of collecting everything again.  By the time she reached the storage shelf, her entire body was a monument to pain.  Her shoulders were hunched, overworked muscles thrumming beneath cold, taut skin.  Her neck was stiff and unyielding, a dull cramp traveling up the side of her face and giving her a tic.  Her pelvis, strapped into the same position for the past twenty hours was shrieking, each movement scraping like ground glass in her joints.  All she could think of now was the warm, four-poster bed awaiting her upstairs in the dormitory and Winky's gentle tuttings as she tucked her into bed.

     Maybe that was why the rosehip, instead of clinking gently into the bosom of the cauldron as it had done all the times before, dropped into it with a tinkling crash.  The sound cut through her sleepy stupor like a thunderclap.  She stared in wide-eyed horror at the corpse of the potions vial, knowing what it would mean.  Her heart, which had been beating drowsily in her chest, began to gallop.  There was the terrible, seductive swish of cloak.

     "You've broken my rosehip vial.  Fresh rosehip is not easy to harvest.  Ten points for breaking my vial and thirty for the inconvenience of having to harvest more," he seethed.  His anger seemed to magnify his scent, and she was dizzied for a moment by the rich smell of allspice.

     "I'm sorry-," she began, her voice slurred with weariness, but Snape cut her off with an impatient stomp of his foot.

     "Enough of your maudlin apologies.  They will do you no good.  You've done enough damage for one night.  Come.  I will return you to Gryffindor Tower," he snarled, and without another word, he wheeled around, jerked the door open, and strode out.

     She followed him out, her chair whirring mournfully, as if it understood how badly she had made a mess of things.  Her head bobbled jerkily on her neck, the muscles too spent to hold it still any longer.  She took a little comfort in the fact that in a few moments she would be wrapped in the toasty warmth of her four-poster, but not much.  She couldn't see much of Snape in the cold, flickering darkness of the corridor, only his outline moving briskly through the pitch, but she could hear the smart clip of his shoes along the stone floor, and they spoke volumes about what he thought of her at the moment.  The rapid, assured steps radiated frank disapproval, made clearer by the fact that he made no attempt to see if she was keeping up.

     She watched the dense shadow she knew to be her professor as it moved with lithe, sensual grace, bitterness gleaming in her blue eyes.  Damn him.  Of course he was good at Potions; his entire body was a testament to undeserved grace and fluidity.  His beautiful, tapered, alabaster hands belonged on a statue of Venetian marble, not on his sour, craggy frame.  She wondered if he would have been able to become a vaunted Potions Master with hands like hers, hands bent and skewered on misaligned wrists.  Would he be able to chop and grind so finely, so perfectly, with such obscene ease, with hands such as hers?  For the most fleeting of moments, she wished he could somehow know the answer to such a musing, could know the shame of not being able to carry out what he knows must be done, of having the world's perception of his intellect and worth marred by the warped looking glass of his crippled body.  She wished him pain and humiliation and despair.

     Just as quickly as the feeling came, it vanished, replaced by familiar remorse.  She shouldn't think that way.  No one deserved to be crippled or suffer, not even Snape.  It was selfish and ugly of her to want others to share in her misfortune.  It was the voice of her bitterness.  She had worked for many years to quell it, to exorcise it, and though she had made great strides, she had never wholly succeeded.  It still crept unbidden into her thoughts now and then, on the days when she felt particularly weak and vulnerable.

     The steady tapping of Snape's shoes halted abruptly.  "We're here."

     "Thank you, sir.  I'm sorry about your vial."

     "Spare me your trite apologies.  I expect to see you in my classroom tomorrow at eight o'clock in the evening.  Goodnight, Miss Stanhope."  He turned to go.

     "Sir?" she called, confused.  "Tomorrow?"

     He turned back to her, bending down so that she could see the grim delight in his eyes.  "Yes, Miss Stanhope, tomorrow.  And the night after that.  And the next, if need be.  You will serve detention with me every night until you achieve a perfect Camoflous Draught, even if it takes all term.  I am most looking forward to it.  It should be a long association, don't you think?"  An unpleasant smile shimmered on his thin lips.  "Goodnight, Miss Stanhope.  You've detained me long enough."

     He turned away from her and was gone, the sound of his footsteps swallowed up by the darkness.  She gaped after him until he had faded from the range of her hearing.  Then she turned, muttered the password, and went inside to muster what comfort and courage she could from her soft bed and Winky's musical little voice before the dawn brought another round of toils and trial, and another night in the clutches of the merciless Professor Snape.  


	6. Rainbow in the Dark

Chapter Six

     After four nights of mind-breaking detention with Severus Snape, the last thing Rebecca wanted was to be roused from much-needed slumber at just past eleven o'clock on Sunday morning by an exuberant Fred and George.

     "Oi, Rebecca, get up," George called from just outside the girls' dormitory, "you've slept half the day away."

     She groaned and rolled onto her side, burying her face in the thick, fluffy Hogwarts pillow.  "Go away."

     "You promised to help us test new products for our joke shop," came Fred's voice.

     "Yeah," said George.

     "Not today," she mumbled, trying to snuggle further beneath the covers.  "I need some sleep."

     "Yes, today," called George.  "You promised, and we've been dying to try these things out.  No one else will help us, and believe me, we've asked everyone."

     She rolled onto her back and swiped at her eyes.  The last thing she wanted was to get out of her warm and inviting bed and spend the afternoon testing things that were likely to explode in her face, turn her green, or otherwise temporarily maim her, but she _had _promised.  Granted, she hadn't thought they would take her up on her spur-of-the-moment offer so soon, but that was still no excuse for breaking her word, no matter how tempting doing so might be.  She liked Fred and George very much, and she supposed she owed them this much for being so nice.  "All right, all right," she grumbled.  "Give me a minute."

     "That's the spirit," crowed Fred.  "We'll be waiting for you in the Common Room."  Two sets of feet padded away.

     "Winky," she croaked, struggling to roll to the edge of the bed, "help me get up, please."

     Winky's bulbous brown eyes appeared at her bedside.  "I is thinking you should stay in bed, miss.  You needs your rest," she squeaked, eyeing her fretfully.

     "I know, Winky, but if I don't get up, they'll hound me all afternoon."

     "I will get rid of them for you, miss," she said, and started purposefully toward the door.

    "No, Winky, don't.  I promised, and I have to go.  I swear I'll be in bed by seven o'clock tonight."

     Winky looked uncertainly from the door back to her.  "Well…"

     "I swear."

     "All right," she said dubiously, and set about getting her out of bed.

     Twenty minutes later, she rolled, bleary-eyed and semiconscious, into the Common Room.  Fred and George were waiting by the unlit hearth, wearing identical expectant expressions.  George's comment about no one else wanting to help out with their experiments echoed in her mind, and she began to wonder precisely what she had gotten herself into.  Her finger twitched on the joystick, and she considered bolting back into the safety and warmth of her bedchamber, but before she could do more than consider this option, the twins cheerfully accosted her.

     "Hello there, Rebecca," said George, clapping her on the back.

     "Ready to go?" asked Fred, beaming at her.

     She held up her hands in protest.  "Wait a minute, wait a minute.  Before I go getting myself turned into who knows what, I want something to eat."

     "Of course, m'lady," George said, bowing gallantly.  "To the kitchens."

     They left the Common Room and headed down the stairs.  Most of the students were taking advantage of the cool fall morning and roaming the grounds by the lake, so no one noticed them slip down the corridor and toward the kitchen.  They stopped in front of a painting of a bowl of fruit.

     "What are we doing here?" she asked.  "The Great Hall and lunch is back there."

     "We're not going to lunch," said Fred with a mischievous glitter in his eyes.  "That would take too long.  We're going straight to the source."  He reached out a finger and tickled the pear in the painting.  With a reedy giggle, the portrait swung open to reveal the great, steaming kitchens of Hogwarts Castle.

     Through the haze of steam shimmering up from the dozens of gargantuan kettles, she could make out nearly one hundred house elves running to and fro in preparation for lunch.  Some carried groaning platters of food-roast meat, steamed vegetables, kidney pies.  Others were up to their gangly elbows in flour and bread dough.  Still others manned the mammoth cauldrons where soup simmered and frothed, stirring the hearty broths with long wooden spoons.  The heat radiating from the room made sweat dampen the back of their robes.  The elves never paused in their work, looking up only long enough to register the presence of the three young interlopers.

     "Can I help yous? asked an old house elf that emerged from the foggy curtain of steam.

     "Oh, hello, Dipply," said George with a broad grin.

     "Oh, it's the Weezy twins," she squeaked happily, clapping her gnarled hands together.  "I is sorry!  I didn't recognize you through all this steam.  I is not knowing her, either."  She gestured in the direction of Rebecca, who sat struggling to breathe the thick, heavy air.

     "Oh, this is Rebecca.  Rebecca, this is Dipply, the Head Kitchen Elf here."

     "Hello."  Rebecca offered up a wan smile.  She wanted to be kinder, but it was taking all of her effort and concentration just to breathe.  Her lungs, ravaged by oxygen deprivation at birth, were underdeveloped and weak, unaccustomed to breathing thick, humid air.  She took a shallow, wheezing breath.

     "Are you all right?" came Fred's voice, sharp with concern.

     "Hmm?  Oh, I'm fine.  It's just the air in here is a bit heavy for me."

     "Oh, right.  We'll hurry things along then.  Dipply, do you think we could pinch a bit of tucker?  Rebecca here hasn't eaten yet."

     Dipply's green eyes widened, and she gave her a sharp, probing look.  "Oh, my, yes!  Miss is terribly pale.  You is staying right here.  Dipply is fixing you right up."  The elf bustled off into the concealing steam again.

     Rebecca didn't want to stay right here.  She wanted to be out of the room and away from the cloying vapors.  But the little elf was trying to be friendly and helpful, and running out after being told to stay put would be most impolite.  So she took deep, snuffling breaths through her nose and willed her invalid lungs to cooperate.  _Just another minute and you'll be outside,_ she told herself.  Her lungs, heavy as wet sandbags, labored inside her chest, and she leaned back in her chair, trying to extend and relax her cramping diaphragm.

     "You all right?"  George put an inquisitive comforting hand on her narrow back.

     She nodded and took a hearty gulp of air.  "Yes.  Just takes a little getting used to, is all," she assured him, cursing herself for yet another display of pathetic weakness.  He looked wholly unconvinced, and frankly, so was she.  She wasn't sure how much longer she could hold out in this suffocating atmosphere.

     Dipply soon returned carrying a platter heaped with breads, pastries, sandwiches, and two pitchers of chilled pumpkin juice.  Though it was easily three times her size, she carried it with practiced ease.  "Here we is.  We'll fatten you up, miss," she declared, holding the immense platter out to Fred and George.

     "Thanks, Dipply.  "You're fantastic," said Fred.  Dipply blushed and tittered like a young schoolgirl.

     "Yeah, Dipply, thanks," agreed George.  "We'd love to stay and chat, but the air in here is a bit too much for Rebecca.  Hope you don't mind."

     Dipply, who had noticed her raspy, ragged breathing shook her head.  "Oh, no, I is understanding.  You take miss out into fresh air."

     Rebecca leaned forward and offered her hand.  "Thanks so much, Dipply.  I'm so sorry I can't stay and chat.  Maybe I could come by some other time when the kitchen isn't quite so busy," she panted.

     Dipply nodded enthusiastically, large ears flapping.  "Oh, yes.  Dipply would like that very much, miss."

     With their goodbyes said and a laden platter of delicious food, they left the sweltering kitchens.  Once outside in the cooler air, Rebecca took a huge, heaving gasp of sweet, dry air as the tension ebbed from her chest.  Christ, but that felt good.  Another few minutes and she would have collapsed.  She leaned against the cool, damp wall and savored the feeling of air passing freely into her lungs.

     "Maybe we shouldn't do this after all," said George, eyeing her with concern.

     "Of course we should," she said, nettled.  It was true she didn't really want to do this, but there was no way she was going to let her lungs or anything else stop her.  She had enough limitations as it was, and she hated being patronized.   If she had promised to try out the twins' new gags, then she was damn well going to do it, even if she had to crawl on her hands and knees to do it.  "Where are we going?"

     The twins only grinned and kept walking.  Now that she was no longer turning green, they had regained their eager, furtive swagger.  They passed corridor after corridor until she was sure they had traversed every square foot of the castle.  George kept the brimming platter tucked closely against his stomach to keep it out of view.  To anyone looking, it would have seemed as though he were suffering a bout of violent stomach cramps.  She rolled along between them at a brisk clip, praying fervently that they wouldn't bump into Professor Snape.  She'd seen enough of him to last the rest of her life.  If he saw them sneaking around with food snicked from the kitchens, they would be in more trouble than anyone could imagine, and she had little doubt that he would take savage glee in crushing her even further beneath his iron heel.

     They stopped before a heavily cobwebbed wall at the end of an isolated hallway.  Little light reached this ancient alcove, and the magical torches perched in either corner flickered hypnotically from their rusted brackets, trying to beat back the encroaching shadows.  Brown spiders, some as big as her hand, scuttled across the sweating stone, spindly legs clittering like dry leaves on shale.  It was cool here, very much like the bleak dungeon in which she was forced to sequester herself night after night, and she gave an involuntary shudder.

     Fred stepped forward and pulled out his wand, taking a quick look around to be sure they hadn't been followed.  He tapped the tip in the center of the wall three times, prompting a powdery explosion of dust.  "_Aperio andron!"_

The solid stone wall shimmered and wavered, a picture seen through a warped mirror, and then, where the wall had been, there stood revealed a narrow, dusty passageway that led into utter blackness.  It was little wider than Rebecca's hunched shoulders.  A sheet of glacial air billowed out at them, and she pulled instinctively away from the opening.

     "Erm, well, we hadn't thought on this," muttered George, glancing from the bloated girth of her chair to the pinched corridor in front of them.

     She was one step ahead of them.  "No problem," she said, and whipped out her wand.  She cleared her throat.  _"Automus Wingardium Leviosa!"  _She grinned as she felt her body leaving the seat.  It was liberating, this sensation of hovering above the bounds of the confining earth.  She felt freer, lighter, unburdened by the myriad aches and pains that pulled at her skin and weighted her bones.  She giggled, momentarily intoxicated by her temporary freedom.

     "Excellent," said Fred admiringly.  Then his brow creased in consternation again.  "What about your chair?  We can't just leave it here.  Filch will find it."

     "Not to worry," she assured him.  She pointed her wand at the chair and murmured a Shrinking Charm.  In an instant, it was the size of her hand.  "Would you mind?" she asked George, gesturing at the chair.

     "Not at all."  He bent down and scooped it up.

     "Um, would you mind if I went between the two of you in case the Levitating Charm wears off?"

     "Of course," said George.  The two of them parted to allow her to slide between them.

     The odd little company set off down the corridor, bumping and jostling one another in the pitch darkness.  Rebecca shivered each time the soft, fuzzy fabric of their sweaters brushed against her skin.  Being so close to others was not something to which she was accustomed.  People usually kept their distance, afraid that they would hurt her with close, intimate contact or be blighted by her infirmity.  It was exquisite, this familiarity, and she breathed deeply, savoring the warm, soapy smell of their skin.  Fred's elbow grazed her forehead, and she grinned at the touch.

     "Sorry."

     "No problem."  In spite of everything, in spite of Professor Snape's constant cruelty, she couldn't imagine a time in her life when she had felt happier, more content, more at peace.  The sound of her dragging feet mingling with their gritty footsteps as they moved through the darkness was harmonious, natural, _right.  _She reached out an exploratory hand, starting when her fingertips discovered the smooth warmth of Fred's neck.

     "Oh, sorry," she said, snatching her hand away.

     Fred chuckled.  "Don't worry about it."

     The corridor ended abruptly, opening out into a cavernous room cluttered with the most bizarre conglomeration of gadgets and bric-a-brac ever imagined.  A three-legged table listed drunkenly against the far wall, piled high with dissembled garden tools and stoppered beakers holding various dried, shriveled, and powdered substances.  Directly across from the cramped doorway sat a gape-mouthed fireplace, its grate choked with cold grey embers.  Rickety shelves lined all four walls, holding an assortment of jars, bottles, unidentifiable hunks of metal, and tins of various sizes.  In the middle of the room, a throw-rug lazed on the hard stone, surrounded by three age-blackened chairs and a tattered, lumpy couch the color of scorched pumpkin.

     "It's chilly in here," she said, her breath pluming in the frigid air.

     "We'll soon set that to rights."  Fred put the platter of food down on the leaning table, where it wobbled precariously.  Rebecca closed her eyes, anticipating a crash, but it remained where it was in defiance of gravity.  Fred crossed the room to the waiting fireplace, pulled out his wand, and mumbled, "_Incendio!"_  A fire erupted in the grate, bathing the room in a sudden rush of warmth and soft light.

     She sighed with relief and moved to sit on the couch.  It gave a pneumatic wheeze as she settled her slight bulk into a sagging crease.  Despite its raggedy appearance, it was exquisitely comfortable, and she sank gratefully into it.  The warmth of the fire was quickly permeating the room.  The bones of her wrist creaked as she put her wand away, soaking up the much-needed heat.  Her stiff muscles began to thaw, and she flexed her hands and fingers experimentally in front of the dancing flames.  With the fire crackling merrily, the room didn't seem quite so dreary and forbidding.

     "All right, Rebecca?" asked Fred.

    "I'm fine."

     "Right, let's get started, shall we?"

     "Well, can we eat first?  I'm starving."

     "Sure," he said, sounding disappointed.

     She giggled.  "Don't worry, Fred, I promise I'll try out anything you like after I've had a bite.  Might be dangerous to work on an empty stomach.  Suppose I disappear?"

     "No one's disappeared yet," said George, bringing the platter to the couch.  

     "Well, there was that one bloke two years ago, but they eventually found him again," offered Fred cheerfully, swiping an egg salad sandwich and a pumpkin pasty from the proffered plate.  "Granted, it took six months and a cadre of Aurors."

     "Oh yeah, I remember.  Poor fellow.  Still in St. Mungo's, isn't he?"  George held out the plate to her.

     She picked among the selections on the plate, trying to hide her nervousness.  Maybe this was a bad idea.  She thought they were joking, but she wasn't sure.  They looked serious enough.  They were nice fellows-at least she thought they were-but she really didn't know them that well.  What if something did happen down here?  No one knew they were here.  If something went wrong, it could be hours before someone noticed they were missing and went looking for them.  Of course, Fred and George would probably go for help, but what if they didn't?  What if they panicked and left her here?  They didn't seem the sort, but danger often brought out the worst in people, particularly when they had a lot to lose, and expulsion certainly counted as a lot.

      Her sudden trepidation must have shown on her face, because George, who had been patiently holding out the platter while she riffled its contents, smirked, his eyes twinkling.  Soon the smirk became muffled guffaws, and then the guffaws turned to gales of laughter.  The plate shook, sending sandwiches sliding toward the edge.  Pumpkin pasties and cauldron cakes tumbled onto her lap, spraying crumbs across her thighs.  A pitcher of pumpkin juice tottered frantically on the edge before he reached out a hand to steady it.

     "What's so funny?" she asked, staring at him in amazement.

     "Oh, nothing," he managed.

     She chanced a glance at Fred, who was sprawled languidly in one of the old chairs.  His hand was cupped over his mouth, and his shoulders shook with mirth.  It dawned on her then that they were having at her, and she screwed up her face in an expression of mock indignation.  It was an expression very reminiscent of Professor Snape, but she was fortunate not to know it.  She folded her arms across her thin chest and eyed them balefully.  "Hmph!  I see why you don't have many volunteers for your little experiments.  Trying to scare them half to death."

     "We haven't told you the best parts yet," said George, setting the plate down beside her on the couch.

     She picked up a squashed and beaten throw pillow and hurled it at him.  He batted it easily aside, and stuffing oozed from a rip in the side.  "Oh, come now," he said, smiling, "we're not THAT awful.  Well, our mum says not.  At least most of the time.  There was that one time-,"

     "Oh shut up," she said, reaching for another throw pillow.

     They dissolved into unrestrained laughter, Rebecca resting her head against the back of the sofa.  Oh, but this was wonderful!  Camaraderie had never been a part of D.A.I.M.S.  Everyone was so busy trying to beat their bodies into submission just to get through another class, another day.  There was little time for idle conversation when one was worried about making it to the bathroom before bowel or bladder betrayed them.  Until now, her days had been filled with the blind need to make it to the finish line, to get from her narrow bed in the morning back to the same bed in the evening without some tragedy befalling her or some humiliation being heaped upon her.  That she was lounging on a decrepit couch, worrying about absolutely nothing, was surreal.  Well, it was divine.

     If she really wanted to be honest with herself, she had to admit that there were other reasons for the self-imposed isolation at D.A.I.M.S., the walling-up of emotions and the masking of true personality.  It was a defense mechanism.  Death was a constant specter there.  Though most of the disabilities suffered by its denizens were not fatal in and of themselves, some, like cystic fibrosis or leukemia, did eventually weaken and ravage their victims beyond hope of survival.  Sometimes, even healthy students fell victim to unforeseen complications.  Epileptics suffered fatal seizures.  Paralyzed students succumbed to deadly lung clots.  Everyone was ever-alert for signs of Death's latest predations.  Those who did not learn to disconnect themselves from the horror of such possibilities paid a heavy price, going to see a sick friend in the infirmary only to find the bed empty, clean sheets stretched over the vast white emptiness, and a hard-jawed nurse glaring down at them, the cold bearer of unwanted news.  Such unfortunates rarely made the same mistake twice.  She hadn't.

     She chewed a piece of ham sandwich slathered in mayonnaise.  So lost was she in thought that she didn't remember picking it up.  She was deep within the labyrinth of her own memories now, remembering things she wished to forget, remembering the day she had learned that painful lesson for herself.  Walking into the numbingly familiar stale stench of prolonged sickness and seeing that bed, terrible in its emptiness.  Seeing that tall, iron-faced nurse and knowing what she would say.  Feeling a miserable throb of gratitude even as rage and grief swamped her senses.  It was over.  For him and for her.  At long last, merciful Jesus, it was over.

     "Rebecca?"  Fred's voice, far away.

     "Huh?"  She jerked from her trance, nearly dropping her half-eaten sandwich.

     "I asked how things were going with Professor Snape," he said.  He sat in one of the chairs with his legs outstretched and his ankles loosely crossed, munching on his third pumpkin pasty.

     "You must have been having some daydream," remarked George.  "Want to share?"

     "No," she said tersely.  Then, realizing how it had sounded, "That is, unless you want to hear my hormonal fantasies about some of the boys in my year."

     "No, thanks," he said quickly, his ears reddening.  She fought to hide a grin.

     "I didn't think so."

     "So?" prompted Fred, brushing stray crumbs from his robes.

     "So what?"  She stuffed the last bite of her sandwich into her mouth.

     "How are things with Snape?"

     She groaned through a mouthful of bread.  "Don't ask.  He's the most awful man I've ever met.  "I don't understand how he keeps his job."

     "That's anyone's guess," said Fred, reaching for the pitcher of pumpkin juice.  "We figure he's got pictures of Dumbledore at some wild staff party or something."

     That was an interesting visual.  Staid, placid Headmaster Dumbledore dancing on the tabletops didn't seem all that likely, but then she'd never seen the man in anything but a professional setting.  For all she knew, he could be the sort that could close a bar in a few hours' time if he so chose.  The esteemed headmaster of the most prestigious wizarding school in the world behaving indecorously and escaping public scrutiny seemed most improbable, though, no matter how different the British magical community might be.  No, there were other reasons for Snape's continued tenure.  It didn't really matter anymore.  He was here, and that was that.

     In truth, her mind wasn't really following the discussion.  It still lingered the pathways of her memories.  It was odd that she should think of that-and of him-now, after all this time.  When had she last thought of him before today?  Three years?  At least.  More?  Probably.  The last dream she'd had about it had been at least that long ago.  She had awakened weeping into her pillow, in the throes of some anguished, hazy nightmare.  She had wept until morning, and that had been the last thought of him until now.

     They were looking at her expectantly again.  She pushed the thoughts of long ago out of her head and resolved to focus on the present.  "I'm sorry.  What was that?"

     Fred rolled his eyes good-naturedly.  "Goodness, woman, is that all you ever think about?"

     She looked at him, nonplussed.  "Hmm?"

     "Which boy is it now?"

     Comprehension dawned as she remembered her glib attempt to deflect their curiosity, and she flushed a deep crimson.  "It's no one."

     The two boys exchanged devilish grins.  "You don't suppose it's one of us, do you, Fred?" asked George.

     "It certainly is possible.  I mean, we are crushingly handsome," came the reply.

     "It is not!  Not that you're not handsome, but, I just mean, oh, shut up!"  She buried her face behind a dusty throw pillow.

     "Maybe it's Snape.  She _has_ been spending an awful lot of time with him," speculated George.  Rebecca groaned behind her pillow.

     "Please, George.  I think our Rebecca here has more taste and better intelligence than that."

     "Thank you, Fred," she muttered.

     "Not at all.  Besides, George, she's quite the vixen.  Surely she could do better than old Snape."

     George got up and went to stand in front of Rebecca, fingers caressing his chin as though he were pondering grave philosophical matters.  After a moment he said, "I believe you're right.  Quite fetching.  Tell me, Rebecca, do the wheels hinder the hunt?"

     She lowered the pillow.  "Wouldn't you like to know," she said saucily, wiggling her eyebrows. 

     Now it was George's turn to squirm and stammer.  "Well, that is, I never thought…may I have another pumpkin pasty?"  He held out his hand.  

     She put one in his hand, and he retreated to the safety of his chair.  She plucked an egg sandwich from the platter and took a generous bite, bemused by his sudden discomfort.  Why was it that males found the idea of possibly wanting to date her so scandalous?  She was ugly, yes, perhaps even monstrous to some, but she was still a girl with the same feelings, desires, and curiosities as everyone else.  On the rare occasion that the spirit took them, she and some of the other girls at D.A.I.M.S. had whiled away hours discussing and debating the various merits and drawbacks of every Muggle musician and movie star of which they could think.  Who had the cutest eyes, the best hair, the nicest butt?  Perennial favorites like Tom Cruise got equal consideration alongside relative newcomers like Josh Hartnett or Elijah Wood.  Sometimes, the chatter grew heated, but it was comforting to know that the same thing was going on in the living rooms and bedrooms of "normal" girls all over the world, that in this, at least, they were not different.

     It suddenly occurred to her then that in all their talk about secret crushes and hormonally driven fantasy, they had never once admitted to liking a boy at the school.  Not one of them, and that was odd.  With the majority of students at D.A.I.M.S. being female, it would have been only logical that one of the girls might have taken at least a passing shine to one of the eligible boys there.  And yet, in all of their conversations about dreamboats and hunks, the names of their male classmates had never come up.  Why was that?

     _You wouldn't like the answer._  No, she had a feeling she wouldn't.  It would say something about herself, about all of the D.A.I.M.S. girls, that she didn't want to hear.  Maybe they were just as selfish as all those people they so smugly and self-righteously condemned as narrow-minded.  Maybe their vanity even exceeded them; after all, they of all people should have known that looks and expectations were deceiving, but like all the rest of the shallow young girls who dreamed of romance and perfection, they had concentrated only on the beautiful things.

     _What's wrong with wanting beautiful things, what everyone else wants? _she thought petulantly.  Nothing.  Except that wasn't the point and she knew it.  She and the others had shunned the boys in the school for the same heartless, petty reasons as all the pristine, privileged people outside the respectable dungeon walls tacitly negated the hopeful, dreaming girls.  The boys were ugly.  They were not polished and flawless; they fell well short of the ideal.  Lips that drooled because they could not control the tongue they had been made to house ruined fanciful visions of moonlit kisses.  They marred the perfect fairy tale that was every little girl's right.

     Why shouldn't they, the young women cursed with healthy hearts and even healthier libidos inside wracked and sickly bodies, have something fine and sound?  Why should they have to settle for the broken, cast-off dregs left by others simply because that was what was expected of them?  They had the right to reach for and attain the dream if they could.  If they could find something more than the twisted, hunch-backed, harelipped Romeos on offer to them, then why was it wrong of them to take it?

     She was appalled with herself for thinking this way, fully aware of the perversity of her line of reasoning, given her position in life and the countless private heartaches she had suffered precisely because of such thoughts.  Yet she could not change it.  The desire for the best, the most perfect, was primal, a biological imperative infused into every cell, even in those creatures who had not achieved it.  In the old days and in the ancient order of the world, the aberrations, the imperfects would have died out, victims of natural selection.  Human compassion had changed all that, and for that she was grateful.  Unfortunately, it had forgotten to change basic human nature, and thus this secret shame.

     She was very relieved when Fred interrupted her thoughts.  "Rebecca, are you ready?"

     "Yes."  She dusted off her hands and sat up as straight as she could.

     "Splendid!"  His face lit up with excitement.  "Would you like to stay there, or would you be more comfortable in your chair?"

     "I'll stay here, thanks.  It's nice to sit in something else for a while."  It was, too.  She had to confess, though, that it was a bit of an out-of-body experience.  She spent so much time in it that the sleek, utilitarian, titanium frame had become her de facto body, the substitute skeleton that supported and moved her badly-realized soul.  She had come to depend upon it, almost love it.  She hated it, too; it was a rigid, intractable jailer, refusing to relax its immutable rules in the slightest, not even to spare her a moment of unease or indignity.  They were locked, she and the machine, in an endless and unendable battle of wills, each claiming ownership over the other.  As yet, there was no clear winner.

     Fred bustled around the room, taking things from the table and shelves, humming happily.  George sat in his chair with a quill and a roll of blank parchment, preparing, she guessed, to record the results of the experiments.  A flutter of nervousness tickled her belly.  If she was going to bow out, now was the time.

     "Erm, Fred, all kidding aside, is this safe?"

     Fred looked up at her while he rearranged various tins and jars into safer positions in his arms.  "Rebecca, we're silly, not stupid," he said gravely.  "We'd never do anything to hurt you."

     "Of course not," she said, speaking through the lump in her throat.  Their obvious concern for her was touching.

     He arranged the various containers on the oval rug, making sure that they were just beyond the range of her randomly kicking feet.  It was such a small gesture, one that would go unnoticed by most, but it spoke volumes about the character of both boys.  It took a lifetime for some people to develop the care, consideration, and sensitivity to her odd idiosyncrasies; some never developed them at all.  That Fred and George could intuitively adapt things to her needs in just six days was a miracle.  For a few minutes at least, the predominantly dim view she held of humanity lightened.

     "Here you are," Fred said, opening a tin and handing her something.

     She looked down at the thing he had placed in her hand.  It was small and round and chocolate.  It was…a bon bon?  She looked at Fred.  "Is this what I think it is?"

     "A bon bon.  Bon apetit."

     She started to pop it into her mouth, but then she hesitated, hand wavering above her upturned mouth.  "What does it taste like?"

     He grinned.  "Don't know.  You are the first to test them, remember?"

     It was decidedly stale.  It was her first thought when she shoved it into her mouth.  Especially the nuts, which resisted her teeth's most fervent efforts to grind them down.  She hoped they were nuts.  They had been here for Merlin knew how long.  "A bit stale," she told him, scraping a piece of petrified nut from between her teeth with her tongue.

     He said nothing.  He was staring at her intently, waiting for a reaction.  Aside from being ancient and nearly inedible, it had tasted just like a walnut bon bon.  She felt the same as she did before she ate it.  Her stomach rumbled quietly, but that was all.  They looked at each other for several long minutes.  The twins' initial enthusiasm faded with each unproductive second.  George, who had been holding quill to parchment attentively, let it droop forlornly in his hand.

     "Well," Fred said with a dispirited shake of the head, "guess that one is a dud."  He reached for another tin.

     Just then Rebecca opened her mouth and gave voice to a low, rumbling, vibrato belch.  It went on and on, a rolling, guttural roar that filled the room.  It went on for so long that she began to wonder if she might not suffocate from lack of air.  The more she tried to stifle it, the more vigorous it became.  Finally, she gave up trying to quell it and sat back, letting her mouth hang open.

     Fred was instantly ecstatic.  "It works!!  It must've taken a while to get going since they've been down here for so long."  He motioned frantically at George to take notes.  The sound of excited scribbling soon joined the uncouth din of her ceaseless belching.

     She thought about asking just how long these strange confections had been here exactly, then decided against it.  It wasn't important, and besides, she needed all the air she could get.  If she had the opportunity to speak, better to use it for more pressing questions, like, "How long is this going to last?"  She managed the query between great, gagging belches and wheezing gasps for air.  She wondered if she had turned purple yet.

     "Theoretically, they're only supposed to last five minutes," said George, offering what he probably thought was a comforting smile.

     _Theoretically.  _As in maybe.  As in they weren't sure.  Wonderful.  She rolled her eyes as another volley of thunderous burping barreled up from the pit of her stomach.  What if she had to serve detention with Professor Snape like this?  Or worse, yet, what if she had to attend class in such a state?  _That _would be a joyous occasion.  Snape would be livid.  He would probably think she was doing it on purpose to sabotage his lesson.  And even if he miraculously managed to restrain himself from tearing her apart with his poison wit, Malfoy would not let such a golden chance for her public disgrace pass him by.  He had not forgotten about their little encounter on the train.

     The thought of taciturn Professor Snape glowering at her while she helplessly bellowed "Moonlight Sonata" in a low, triumphant belch flitted through her mind, and she bent double on a sudden clot of laughter.  Trying to laugh while belching was a horrendous idea, she soon found out.  What little air she was thieving between long exhalations was cut off as neatly as though someone had pinched her windpipe between their fingers.  The steady belch ceased, and her eyes bulged.

     Fred, thinking the trick had spent itself, reached over and clapped her on the back.  "Good show."

     The sharp jolt to her back kickstarted her breathing, and she took a whooping gulp of oxygen, promptly releasing it again in the form of a monstrous, jaw-popping burp.

     "Encore!" shouted George gleefully, his duties as impartial recorder of events forgotten.  She groaned.

     "Only a minute or so more," called Fred, mistaking the noise for a sign of impatience.  

     Eventually, it did taper off, and when it did she sagged into the ragged cushions.  She was wrung out from the constant expulsion of air.  Her chest ached dully.  It was nice to be able to breathe again.

     "What did you think?" asked Fred earnestly.

     "Well," she said thoughtfully, using her knobby elbow to push herself into a sitting position, "I don't suppose many people would have a problem with it if I didn't, but you might want to put a warning label on it for people who have asthma."

     "What's that?" asked George.

     "It's a Muggle condition that affects breathing.  People who have it sometimes have trouble breathing.  The tubes and sacs that carry air to their lungs become inflamed and swell.  Usually, it's mild, but sometimes it's deadly."

     "Oh.  Oh my," said Fred, and she could see all sorts of hideous possibilities playing themselves out behind his eyes.  Grieving parents coming to their shop to berate them for their carelessness.  "Yes, I think that would be wise," he said slowly.  "Make a note of that, George."

     "Of course, I doubt you'll have many Muggles coming to your shop," she pointed out, hoping to lift his spirits.  "And I've never met an asthmatic wizard."

     "Until I met you, I'd never met a disabled wizard, either," he said somberly.

     Touche.  That had been an incredibly stupid thing to say.  If there were disabled wizards, then there had to be asthmatic wizards.  Just because she hadn't seen one at D.A.I.M.S. did not mean they didn't exist.  Hell, most wizards didn't know she existed, though she most certainly did, and she considered them uniformed, presumptuous fools.  Which was what she had just been.  "Yeah, I guess you're right," she said.  Then, "What's next?"  She wanted to get rid of the sudden seriousness that had fallen over them.

     "Ah," said Fred, reaching into a jar.  "Try this."

     "What does it do?"  She wasn't going to eat it if it involved the secretion or expulsion of any bodily fluid, friends or not.

     "You'll see.  No more belches, I promise."

     "I'm not going to pass gas, am I?"

     He snorted.  "Nothing of the sort.  That's still in development."

     "You'll help us test it when it comes to it, won't you?" pleaded George, fixing her with his best hang-dog look.

     "Don't count on it," she muttered, and crammed the cracker Fred held out to her into her mouth.  It, too, was stale.  This time no one was worried when nothing happened at first.  They sat in amiable silence, George pulling absently on the feather at the end of his quill.  

     "Looks like this one works, too," Fred said suddenly, gazing raptly at the top of her head.  George wrote something on the parchment he balanced on his knee.

     "What is it?" she asked suspiciously, reaching up to feel her hair.  She fully expected to find her scalp disturbed by the protuberance of a pair of horns, or perhaps a grotesque third eye goggling from the middle of her forehead.  There was nothing of the sort, however; her forehead and scalp were just as smooth as they always had been.

     "Here, have a look," said Fred.  He left his chair and rummaged about on one of the sagging, dust-covered shelves, returning with a tarnished handmirror.

     She took it from him and held it up to her face.  In its warped and cracked surface, she saw herself and smiled.  Her hair, her one physical vanity, was cycling through a variety of neon colors, running from supernova red to electric blue in the blink of an eye.  It was outrageously bizarre and fabulously wonderful.  She laughed, her hand spasming around the blackened pewter handgrip.  She felt like she had slipped through a crack in the glass wall of reality and fallen into a secret wonderland, a land of freedom and joy and unbridled experimentation.  She pitied her old friends stuck back at D.A.I.M.S., toiling beneath the burden of tightly controlled, sanitized magic.  They didn't understand what they were missing.  It would be tragic if they did.  "This is terrific."  There were no words in the English language to describe what it was; "terrific" was woefully inadequate, but it was as close as human speech was going to get.

     George smiled, obviously pleased by her reaction.  "We're just getting started, duck."

     Indeed they were.  For hours uncounted they plied her with frothing liquids, stale crackers, old bonbons, and tasteless granulated powders.  Each one brought about a different change in her appearance.  A blue Bertie Bott bean made her enormously fat.  A bubbling drink that tasted of dirty sweatsocks covered her in downy purple fur.  A chocolate éclair made her sing like an opera soprano every time she tried to speak.  With each success, the twins grew more and more jubilant, and for her part, Rebecca had never been happier.  Her sides and jaw ached from constant laughter, and for the first time in many years, she never once stopped to consider her disability.  She was just Rebecca Stanhope, average student at Hogwarts, having the time of her life with two friends.

     That something would go wrong was inevitable.  The innocuous cookie that was supposed to turn her navy blue had tasted no staler than any of the other fare she had sampled.  When the color had not faded after five minutes, there were nervous titters of amusement.  When it was still there ten minutes later, the amusement was replaced by consternation and murmured conferences about what to do.  After fifteen minutes with no change, consternation gave way to genuine concern.  "Maybe you should go see Madam Pomfrey," said Fred at last.

     The thought of putting herself at the mercy of Madam Pomfrey made her uneasy.  No doubt Madam Pomfrey was still upset about their first meeting.  Most doctors and nurses bristled any time their credentials were called into question, and she had done just that.  In front of the Headmaster, no less.  Definitely not the wisest move she had ever made.  The Mediwitch wasn't going to be thrilled to see her, and an angry person coming at you with something sharp and likely painful was never a welcome sight.  "It won't go away on its own?" she asked hopefully.

     "Maybe, but if it hasn't by now, it's probably not going to, and you don't want to go to class like that," said George.

     She grimaced.  He had a point.  A blue classmate would be hard to ignore.  Even McGonagall, who seemed to go out of her way to make things easier for her, would take exception, and if she took umbrage, then Snape would slowly but surely work himself into a vitriolic frenzy.  By the end of the lesson, he would have her reduced to a shell-shocked blue puddle and have stripped enough points from Gryffindor to send McGonagall into a fit of weeping, despairing melancholy for months.  To Madam Pomfrey it was, then.  "All right, but I'd prefer you didn't go with me.  Wouldn't want to draw attention."

     "Don't think you'll be able to help that, Rebecca," Fred said gaily," but I'll walk you to the door at least."

     He let her out of the secret entrance, waiting until she had enlarged her chair and sat down before disappearing into the darkness again.  Night had fallen while she and the twins had been at their secret work.  It was just after supper, and though most of the students had already gone back to their Common Rooms, some still straggled through the halls, and they spared her startled stares as she passed.  A second-year Slytherin guffawed as she moved by.

     "Never seen a shape-shifter before?" she snarled, prompting a dubious silence.  She wasn't a shape-shifter, but the little lie had been worth it to cause that little miscreant a moment of doubt.

     _Well, at least you've given them another reason to stare at you, _pointed out her grandfather pragmatically.  Yes, she had.  She sat up a little straighter and began to hum.  She didn't care if they looked now.  At least this little accident had given them a legitimate reason to ogle her passing shadow.  Now they could preoccupy themselves with her blue hue rather than her gnarled, twisted limbs.  She had been granted a temporary shield.

     Madam Pomfrey's infirmary was in an alcove on the third floor.  Parallel rows of crisply starched beds lined the walls, and a dozen windows let the cool starlight filter in and tattoo the floor with ghostly, shifting patterns.  The sheer white curtains fluttered in the breeze, trailing softly over the gleaming bone-white metal bedframes.  This early in the year, all the beds were empty, but she knew that as the year wore on, more and more of them would fill.  Potions accidents, Transfiguration errors, Quidditch injuries, and general malaise would all take their toll.  None of the injuries would be serious or life-threatening, of course.  Not here.

     Though the atmosphere in here was less astringent, less cloyingly antiseptic than D.A.I.M.S., there could be no mistaking its purpose.  The white, bloodless beds made it abundantly clear that this was a place of sickness and sorrow.  They were coffins without lids, sheeted morgue slabs.  There were other signs, too, more subtle but no less unnerving to those who had learned to understand their portents, to pore over them like mystic shamans deciphering prophecy runes.  Metal bedpans gleamed dully from beneath murky beds, awaiting anointment.  A wardrobe squatting in the far corner held fresh towels.  Maybe they would remain there the duration of the year, comfortably idle, but more likely they would be pressed into service to mop up blood or vomit or feces, the dark offerings of the ailing human body.  Another cabinet in the opposite corner was probably home to the plethora of potions, nostrums, and poultices brewed and crafted by the desperate to ward off Death, to squeeze that one last day, one last hour, from the cup of life.  It was a joke.  Death always came for you, always won in the end.  It hardly ever came when you were ready and waiting for it.  It came slinking like a dirty thief, stealing that which was most precious before anyone could raise the alarm.  Sometimes it came quickly, but just as often it toyed with you, made you suffer before the end.  She had learned this early.  Learned it and never forgot it.

     Maybe it was the line of thought that drew her eyes to the bed in the darkest, loneliest corner, or maybe it was because it was where it was, but whatever the reason, they strayed there and froze.  She knew it wasn't the same bed.  That bed was a continent away; for all she knew they burned it after everything was over.  It could have been its twin, though-it had the same, wan, bleached sheets, the same gouge in the steel bedframe, the same lost look.  The same diseased air hung over it in a greasy pall.  It was the deathbed, the place reserved for those without hope.  She wondered how many it had consumed there in its dark corner.

     Memories swelled in her mind and she moved toward it in a trance, free hand extended to brush its surface.  She remembered the deathbed well.  For the better part of a year, she had watched it consume her best friend, eating away at his vitality.  The white-frocked nurses all thought it was the leukemia that was eroding his mind and wilting his spirit, but she had known better.  She knew it was the bed that was killing him, growing brighter even as he grew weaker and duller.  Near the end, the sheets had been impossibly bright.  It had hurt her eyes to look at them.  By contrast, her friend was little more than a dark smudge against the linen, a spirit clinging to life by the palest of threads.  The bed had thrived on his sickness, growing more pristine with each worsening of his condition.

     Her shaking fingertips brushed the coverlet, and she was immersed in a moment of total recall.  Madam Pomfrey's quiet, dark infirmary was replaced by the nauseatingly white walls of the hospital wing at D.A.I.M.S., and she was standing at the end of that long aisle between the beds trying to ignore the stink of infirmity that stained the walls and permeated the linoleum floor.  The bed that she had visited so often was empty, its linens glaringly white, even at this distance.  It was victorious.  It had eaten him in the night.

     A nurse moved to intercept her, but she might as well have been trying to stop the revolution of the Earth around the sun.  She swerved around her, ducking past the outstretched, impeding arm.  She had to see, to know for absolute certain.  The bed sat, cold and brilliant, leering at her.  She rolled to its side, the taste of dried talc in her mouth like ash.  A hand reached out to pull back the sheet.  She knew what she was looking for-strands of brilliant mahogany hair interwoven into the mattress, _assimilated._  The sheet felt dusty beneath her touch.  Shivering fingers closed around the sheets that still held the stink of his death in their pores.  The nurse, far away, calling, "Miss Stanhope?  Miss Stanhope, please-,"

     She came back to herself to find that she was clutching the coverlet in cold hands.  Someone was calling her name.  She dropped the crumpled sheets on the bed and turned around to see Madam Pomfrey staring at her with a puzzled expression.  When the plump witch got a good look at her, her gaze sharpened with clinical concern.

     "What happened, Miss Stanhope?  What are you doing with that bedsheet?"

     "I…I was…just-," she stammered.  Just what?  Losing her mind?  That's what it had felt like.  Like she had been uprooted from the firm bedrock of rationality and hurtled headlong into madness.  After all these years phantoms she had thought long-buried were springing from their tombs to roam the febrile landscape of her thoughts.  She fought to return them to the cast-iron vault into which she had cast them and slammed it shut, praying that this time, it would hold.

     "Well, never mind," Pomfrey said when no answer was forthcoming, "just come over here."

     She retreated from the deathbed, casting a last befuddled glance in its direction before following the Mediwitch to her examination area.  The woman pulled the privacy curtain around them and turned to gaze sternly down at her.  "Now, what happened?"

     "Well, some friends and I were fooling around with magic, and-,"

     "Fred and George Weasley, I'll wager," she sniffed.  When Rebecca looked at her in guilty astonishment, she said, "What?  It's not that much of a mystery, really.  Anytime the phrase, 'friends and I' and 'fooling with magic' come up, it's a good bet those two are involved.  Let me guess, more wares for the fabled 'Weasleys Wizard Wheezes' Joke Shop?"

     "Yes, ma'am."

     "They've been on about setting up that shop for years.  You're not the first person they've sent up here, not by a long chalk."  She moved her wand deftly along Rebecca's body, clucking softly.  "I think I've got just the thing.  Wait here."

     She bustled off, leaving Rebecca behind the partition.  She could hear her moving around outside, the clink of jars as she gathered something from the cupboard.  Being in her presence, it was clear that Madam Pomfrey was an efficient, highly capable Mediwitch.  She owed her an apology.  She'd wait until after the medicine had been given, otherwise the apology would seem like brown-nosing in an attempt to avoid being poisoned in vengeance.

     Madam Pomfrey returned with an unlabeled bottle of amber liquid.  She uncorked it and poured a generous dollop.  "Here.  Drink up.  It's going to taste awful."

     She sniffed it.  "What is it?"

     "Afraid I'll poison you?"

     _Ah, you do remember._  "No, ma'am.  I just like to know what I'm getting."

     "It's _Delia's Dermableach._  Your friends used a bit too much Blue Welsh Pixie shavings in whatever it is they gave you.  This should clear it up," she said tersely.

     Rebecca tipped back the cup and swallowed it in a single quaff.  The nurse was right.  It was horrible.  It was slimy and tasted like rotten asparagus.  She grimaced and gagged as it went down.

     "Try not to retch, please.  It won't do you any good if it comes back up."

     "Yes, ma'am.  Madam Pomfrey?  I'm sorry about the things I said in the Headmaster's office.  I was wrong."

     "And well you should be," she said stiffly.

     "It's just that I've had a lot of bad experiences with doctors, and sometimes I speak without thinking."

     Pomfrey drew herself up.  "I should think that you of all people should recognize the stupidity of judging all by the actions of a few," she said sharply.

     Trumped by the second person in one day, she could think of no response.  Her odd flashback to a time long past had rattled her deeply.  Had she been less tired, she might have resented the insinuation that since she was a member of an oppressed and ignored group, she should never make an error in judgment.  But she was too tired, and so she only said, "All the same, I'm sorry, ma'am."

     "Well, you can't take it back," she said, and though her voice was cold, the hard line of her mouth softened the slightest bit.

     "No, ma'am, I can't."

     "Off you go.  You'll be all right in the morning."

     "Goodnight, Madam Pomfrey."

     "Goodnight."

     At the same time that Rebecca was making her way back to the Gryffindor Common Room, Severus Snape was sitting in Albus Dumbledore's office.  The Headmaster was watching him gravely, sipping a steaming cup of Earl Grey tea.

     "You look tired, Severus," he said, eyeing him with concern.

     "I _am _tired.  I've had Stanhope in detention every night; the girl is a disaster."  He rubbed his eyes and reached for his own cup.

     "Oh?  How so?  I was under the impression that she was more than capable of doing the work with the right materials.  Is this not the case?"

     "I have not yet procured those materials," he said stiffly, setting his cup down in its saucer.

     "Are they hard to find?  I can send for them if need be."

     "No, Headmaster, it isn't that.  I'm not entirely certain providing special equipment for her is prudent."

     "Oh?  Why not?"  The Headmaster leaned forward on his desk.

     "No other student has been given these materials.  They have to work with what they are given, regardless of their skill.  Why should she be any different?  No one offers Longbottom special equipment, and he is as crippled as she is when it comes to the mastery of Potions."

     "Ah, but Neville has not been burdened with such crushing physical infirmity," he pointed out, folding his hands.

     "No, but he is limited by his mind, and that is so much the worse.  Shall I give him the answers to the homework, then?  After all, he can't help that he is a complete dunderhead."

     "Point taken," conceded Dumbledore, pouring himself another cup of tea.  "The question remains, then.  Is there any reason to think that, given a body like the rest of us, she could not do the work?  In other words, is her mind affected?"

     He pondered the question carefully.  Based on what he had seen, her mind was quite acute; indeed, he had been privately impressed by her solution to the rosehip problem.  It had shown a remarkable propensity for thinking quickly and beyond the pale of normal logic.  It pained him to think this about a student, especially one who irritated him as much as she did, but it was the unfortunate truth.  He could lie, say she was a thick-skulled idiot beyond hope, but Dumbledore would know he was being untruthful.  The man knew everything.  Exactly how he knew so much, he couldn't say.  Even if he were the doddering old fool some took him for, he would never deceive him.  He owed him too much.

     "I think, sir," he said slowly, resting his chin on his hands, "that despite that appalling wreck of a body, her mind is most astute.  However, the limitations of her body are too great for her to overcome.  She shouldn't be here."

     "If you truly believe that, Severus, then why spend such an inordinate amount of time with her in detention?  Why not just let her fail?" he asked sagely.

     _Because I want to see her break.  I want her to know beyond doubt that she was not good enough.  I want to prove my will is stronger.  _"I'll not have her poor performance reflect on my reputation as a teacher," he said haughtily, straightening his robes with a flourish.

     "Indeed," muttered Dumbledore with a barely suppressed smirk.

     "If I may, Headmaster, why her?  Hogwarts has had thousands of requests for transfer.  Why her?"

     "Ah, Severus, I thought you would have guessed."

     "No, Headmaster, I haven't.  Especially not with things as they are.  War is coming.  If war breaks out, she will be vulnerable, a liability."

     "Precisely, Severus.  We both know war is imminent, even if the Ministry doesn't want to see it.  Everything will change.  We must be prepared for both the war and what comes after.  We were lucky last time.  We will not be so lucky this time."

     The exact realization of why he had brought her here slammed into him like a sharp blow to the chest, and he sat back in his chair.  "I see."

     "Has there been any word from Voldemort?" Dumbledore asked, changing the subject.

     "Nothing."  Unconsciously, his hand strayed to the mark on his forearm, and he traced his fingers delicately over its design.  His brand.  He had spent half his life wishing it would never burn again, and now he prayed to feel its gnawing agony racing up his arm.  But it lay still and silent on his arm.

     "Most distressing.  Has there been any clue from Lucius Malfoy?"

     "No.  He has made absolutely no mention of any initiation ceremony, which leads me to believe it has not yet taken place, but it may be that he is assuming knowledge I don't have."

     Dumbledore took off his spectacles and began to polish them on the hem of his robes.  "If you are summoned, perhaps you shouldn't go."

     "Out of the question."

     "It's too dangerous for you now."

     "It has always been dangerous.  I was well aware of the risks when I came to you.  You need the information I can provide, now more than ever."

     "Were you?  I wonder.  Much was different then.  You were young, and I was naïve.  I wonder if I haven't doomed us both."

     "Headmaster…"  Snape did not know what to say.  He had never seen the older man so depressed.

     "Oh, don't mind me.  I'm just an old man who thinks far too much, far too late."

     "You underestimate yourself, Headmaster."

     "You place far too much faith in me, dear boy," he said wearily.

     "You are far more guilty of that than I," he countered drily.

     "I don't think so.  I don't think so at all."  He smiled softly at the younger man, and then he stood abruptly.  "Will there be anything else?"

     Snape stood.  "Shall I order the special equipment for Stanhope, sir?" he asked, pained.

     "No.  I shall leave that to your discretion.  So long as it doesn't adversely affect the young lady's health, I'll allow you to proceed as you see fit.  I'll trust you not to be excessive."

     "I wouldn't dream of it," he purred, prompting a sharp look from the Headmaster.  He turned to go.

     "Severus?"

     "Yes?" he turned back, the door ajar.

     "Be careful.

    He nodded once.  "Goodnight, Headmaster."  He closed the door softly behind him.

     Albus Dumbledore stood looking at the door for a very long time, thinking on the decisions he had made to bring them to this.  Then he turned and started up the stairs, age weighing on his bones more heavily than it had in a very long time.


	7. Decisions, Decisions

Chapter Seven

     Breakfast on the morning Severus Snape crossed every bound of human decency was the usual affair of grunted, semi-incoherent greetings and red-eyed contemplation of dry toast.  Rebecca slouched amenably between the twins and Seamus Finnegan, who sat dipping his toast into his eggs with enthusiasm.

     "That's disgusting," she said, taking a ginger bite of bacon.  Her head throbbed dully from lack of sleep.  She'd spent another night in the clutches of Professor Snape, and four hours of rest was all she'd managed.  Worse still, she had yet to produce an acceptable Camoflous Draught, which meant she could expect to find herself there again tonight.

     "It is not," Seamus retorted.  "You Americans, always so finicky.  It all ends up in the same place anyway."

     "Seamus, please," she groaned, dropping her fork and closing her eyes against an unwelcome image of Seamus' breakfast sitting in a congealed lump inside his stomach.

     "What?" he asked innocently, taking a large bite of greasy sausage.

     "Oi, Rebecca," George cut in before she could muster a retort, "sorry about your hair, eh?"

     "Don't worry about it," she said, flapping her hand dismissively.  "It'll go away sooner or later.  Besides, it's kinda cool."  She had awakened this morning to discover that the Rain-Glo Coiffure Cracker had developed unexpected side-effects.  Far from fizzling out after five minutes as previously thought, her hair had begun to display the interesting habit of intermittently blazing a brilliant red, green, or blue for a minute or longer before lapsing into its more sedate golden hue again.  As if to prove its point, it flared a brilliant red, eliciting good-natured laughter from the rest of Gryffindor Table, laughter in which she gladly joined.

     "Well done, Weasley.  Now perhaps you can take her home and use her as a traffic signal for your family.  Merlin knows there are enough of you in that ramshackle house of yours.  Or was it a cardboard carton?"

     They turned to see Draco Malfoy standing there with a superior smirk plastered on his pale face, cronies in tow.  One hand rested loosely on his hip.  The other delicately held a gooey cinnamon roll.  It was such an effeminate gesture and posture that she fought not to laugh, and yet he still exuded a burgeoning masculinity that had made many girls momentarily heady.  Rebecca was not immune, but she was realistic enough to understand that falling victim to a hopeless, sado-masochistic crush on someone she could never have was the ultimate stupidity, and her hatred of his elitist, smug demeanor succeeding in crushing whatever seed of lust planted in the dim reaches of her brain by those cold, bright grey eyes.  She gritted her teeth against a tart reply and remained silent.  She was too tired to fight this morning.

     Draco, however, had no such reservations.  He turned his gaze to her, dropping his hand from his hip.  "You know, Stanhope, it really is an improvement," he sneered.

     She smiled apologetically.  "Pity nothing can be done for you."

     His eyes hardened.  "I can do anything I please, stupid bint.  One of the advantages of being a Malfoy, I'm afraid.  So sorry to disappoint you."

     She had no idea what the term "bint" meant, and so most of the sting of the insult was lost on her, but something in his tone infuriated her.  He was so sure of his vaunted pedigree and all of the privilege and entitlement that it carried with it.  He was invulnerable, or so the insulated world in which he lived had led him to think.  Nothing, especially not a bit of deformed rabble like her, would ever dare stand against him.  The power of his name would see to that.

     She had no idea why she did what she did next.  Perhaps it was because she was tired.  Maybe her unbreachable wall of careful indifference had been worn down by a combination of Professor Snape's scathing disdain and her own desire to finally let life inside her stolid mental fortress.  Or maybe it was because she just wanted the conflict, the excitement of disquiet, the bitter tang of adrenaline in her mouth, and the exhilarating thrum of energy in her veins that made the whole world brighter, if only for an instant.  Maybe she wanted to taste cruelty from her own bitter lips.

     Whatever the reason, a lazy smile spread across her face, and her hand came up to stroke her chin.  "On second thought, Draco, I think I _can_ do something for you," she said slowly.  Quick as a striking cobra, her right hand swung out and smashed the cinnamon roll he was holding into his face.

     He stared at her in surprise for a moment, a runner of sweet cream dripping from his burnished platinum hair.  Then his marble hand flashed out with blinding speed and cracked across her face like a whip.  Her head snapped back with the force of the blow, and she hissed as her neck spasmed painfully.  The slap was hard enough to make her ears ring; she barely heard Draco growl, "Bitch!" in a throaty whisper as his hand came up again.

     Bedlam erupted in the Great Hall.  Fred and George came off the bench like coiled springs and launched themselves at Malfoy, who took a startled step back. Seamus dropped his fork and lunged at Goyle. Crabbe stood paralyzed in dumb surprise, unable to believe what was happening around him. Rebecca sat in her chair, tasting blood on her lips and feeling the heated sting that Malfoy's palm had left on her cheek.

     She watched the chaos around her with clinical detachment, absently rubbing her burning cheek.  All of this, wrought by her hand.  And everyone thought it fragile.  She smirked, turning to watch as George and Goyle rolled by, a red and black mass of furious arms and legs.  There was a meaty thud; Goyle's ham-sized fist had connected with George's right eye.  Students from all Tables were swarming around the combatants, and the shrill, feverish cry of "Fight!!" rang out like exultation.

     Crabbe, sluggish synapses firing at last, stepped forward, intending perhaps, to collar Fred, who was choking Malfoy with savage abandon.  But then a new sound echoed through the Hall like judgment and black wrath-the sound of chairs being pushed back from the High Table.  All sound and motion ceased, and three hundred heads swiveled to watch the advent of calamity.

     They moved calmly, leisurely.  The throng parted noiselessly before them.  Few dared look them in the eye, and those who did could not look away.  It was clear from the purpose in their stride and the grim set of their faces that they would be bringers of terrible justice.  An exhalation, soft and mournful, rippled through the assemblage.  They knew that whatever they were about to see would not be readily forgotten.

     McGonagall, her face as hard and cold as her mythical namesake, appeared, her eyes blazing.  "What in the name of Merlin is going on here?" she thundered, taking in the carnage at her feet.  Her thin mouth worked.  "I have never, in my life, seen such…such barbarity."

     Fred and George looked chagrined.  Goyle looked oddly embarrassed.  Even the luckless Crabbe, who had never gotten involved in the melee, stared shame-faced at the floor.  Only Draco looked unrepentant.  He sat on the ground in a state of rumpled dignity.  He clutched his left hand to his chest.  Three of his fingers dangled awkwardly, broken by mistimed contact with Fred Weasley's nose.  They had already begun to swell, bloated sausages on the end of a supple, slender hand.

     Rebecca sat in her chair, unaffected by the fracas she had helped to instigate.  She felt no remorse for it.  Draco Malfoy deserved everything he had gotten and more.  For the first time in his life, he had experienced painful negative consequences for his actions, and from the pained, sullen look on his face, it was something he found most distasteful.  Good.  The sooner he found out that life was not a plaything constructed to cater to his every whim and fancy, the better off they would all be.  Except for Malfoy, of course, but who gave a damn about him?  She took a vicious satisfaction in the knowledge that she had played a part in his education.

     She watched McGonagall as she turned accusatory eyes to each member of the fist-to-cuff.  She didn't give a damn what she thought, either, come to think of it.  What did she know about it anyway?  Secreted away with her books and parchments, when was the last time that she had stepped into the real world and dealt with anything besides teapots and silver sets or the imaginary boggart of third-year Defense Against the Dark Arts?  Did she expect her to duck her head in proper deference each time Malfoy passed her in these hallowed halls, yet another stepping-stone on his path to bought-and-paid-for-glory?  

     The stunned throng parted again, and this time Snape stepped through in a swirl of velvetine black.  He was black death in human form, and the students beneath his gaze recoiled.  His simmering gaze fell on the Weasley twins, who sat sprawled at his feet.  "Get up," he hissed through gritted teeth.  "And if I find even one drop of blood on my boots, both of you will be most unhappy."

     They struggled to their feet, each carrying the battle scars of their brush with Malfoy and his cohorts.  Fred clutched a broken nose behind one bloodied hand.  Ill-timed as Draco's punch may have been, it had still done its damage.  George's right eye was swollen shut, a grotesque tattoo on his wan face.  Snape eyed them in disgust.

     "You too, Malfoy," snapped McGonagall.  "On your feet."

      Malfoy, who had not uttered a peep since calling her a bitch a few minutes before, suddenly began to howl and moan.  He clutched his wounded left hand in his right, making sure his broken digits were on prominent display.  "But Professor," he moaned, "my hand."  He thrust it at her with an agonized groan.

     McGonagall watched his theatrics in unimpressed silence.  "Perhaps if you weren't throttling it like a dead goose, the pain would lessen considerably.  And last I checked, your hand was not needed to stand up.  So get up.  Now."

     He got to his feet with oaths of retribution and lawsuits from his influential father.  Seamus, too, pulled himself from the floor, remarkably unscathed by the brawl.  A single shallow scratch above the bridge of his nose was the only evidence he'd been involved at all, and he'd probably only gotten that because he'd missed Goyle on his initial leap and crashed to the stone floor.

     McGonagall folded her arms across her chest and scowled.  "I asked you all a question!  What happened here?"

     No one said a word.  Feet scuffled nervously on stone.  And then, "Malfoy started it."  A thick, wet voice.  Fred, talking from behind his bloody hand.

     "Oh?"  McGonagall turned her sharp eyes to Malfoy, who glared smugly back with no discernible unease.

     "Yes, ma'am.  He called Rebecca a bint."  There were gasps of horrified surprise.

     "He what?" sputtered McGonagall.  She turned the brunt of her ire on Draco, who suddenly looked far less sure of himself.  "Mr. Malfoy, I am appalled.  How could you use such crass, filthy language?"  A red flush was creeping into her cheeks, and her voice grew shrill with her ever-increasing rancor.

     "Mr. Weasley, kindly remove your hand from before your mouth.  No one can understand a word you're saying," Snape spoke up.  He had been watching the unfolding drama without a word, a picture of dull disinterest.  Now, though, his eyes gleamed with a spark of thoughtful cunning, a spark that made Rebecca suddenly very afraid.  He was up to no good.

     "Don't be ridiculous, Professor Snape.  I heard Mr. Weasley perfectly well.  He said Mr. Malfoy called Rebecca a-," McGonagall sniffed, but Snape paid her no mind.  He was staring at Rebecca as though she were the most important thing in the world.  At her face.

     "No one has asked Miss Stanhope what happened.  Surely she saw the whole thing?"  He glided to her side and placed a pale, heavy hand on her hunched shoulder.  "Tell us what happened, Miss Stanhope.  How did you come by that rather nasty welt on the side of your face?" he asked in his dark liquid purr.  His hand came up to probe the mark with cold, feathery fingers, and she winced.

     "My word," cried McGonagall in renewed alarm, just noticing the ugly black bruise blooming on her cheek.  "Miss Stanhope, to the Hospital Wing at once!"

     Rebecca fought to keep her face expressionless as irritation bubbled just beneath the surface.  It had just been a slap-a good one-but that was all.  It hadn't been a roundhouse punch or a karate thrust.  She was fine.  Her jaw would throb and sting, maybe even swell a bit, but there was definitely no cause for alarm.  She'd gotten worse injuries tumbling out of bed or slipping off the toilet.  So why was she being sent to the Hospital Wing?  Fred and George were in far worse shape, especially poor Fred, who was now developing raccoon eyes as his nose continued to swell.  Yet McGonagall ignored them completely, focusing instead on her face like it was the gravest injury she had ever seen.

     _You know why she's sending you._  She quashed a disgusted cluck behind her teeth.  She was not made of blown glass, no matter what anyone thought.  A slap to the face affected her the same way it did everyone else-with a throbbing face.  She was not going to fall down in a frothing seizure or go blind.  She would not develop a permanent lisp or facial tic.  Her legs were not affected by her face, and this overprotective mothering was an exercise in stupidity.  She would go to the infirmary, only to be told by Pomfrey what she already knew.  It was a simple bruise, not a cancer or tumor, and time would take care of it nicely.  On the other hand, any chance to away from this brewing storm was worth taking.  She turned to go.

     "Stay where you are, Miss Stanhope."  Cold steel dancing across silk.  "Professor McGonagall, I see no reason to send her to the Hospital Wing just yet.  Her injuries do not appear life-threatening, or indeed, threatening at all.  I think there are other matters to sort out first.  Namely, the exact nature of this sordid little business."

     "But Professor Snape, her face," she protested.

     "Is bruised.  Nothing more.  The Weasleys and Malfoy are far more seriously injured, and yet I don't see you clamoring for them to get medical attention," he said with asperity.

     "They are not as delicate as Miss Stanhope," she snapped.

     Snape closed the gap between himself and the indignant McGonagall.  His thin, pallid lips grazed her ear.  "I have spent every night save one with her since her arrival.  I know unequivocally what she can and cannot do, and I can assure you, the slap will not prove fatal."

     McGonagall drew herself away.  "Yes, well, your judgment has been impaired before," she hissed in a low whisper.

     Snape stepped abruptly back, his body stiff, and Rebecca, too far away to hear the muffled discourse, got the distinct impression that an invisible line had been crossed.  His lip curled in an outraged sneer, and he whirled away from his colleague.  "Perhaps we should take this up in the Headmaster's office," he said shortly.

     "Yes, I think that would be wise," came the somber voice of Albus Dumbledore from behind McGonagall's sparse frame.

     Rebecca wondered how much he had seen and heard.  His serene blue eyes betrayed nothing, but something told her he was well aware of everything that had gone on, including the nasty little conversation between her two professors.  Though his bearing was relaxed, his eyes were hard and calculating, scrutinizing the pair of brooding academics.  Neither of them was comfortable with his gaze; they cast their eyes anywhere but on his face.  McGonagall commenced polishing her spectacles; Snape contented himself with making the curious students around him squirm under his merciless eyes.

     "Headmaster, Malfoy has made a perfect beast of himself.  He has struck Miss Stanhope, as you can clearly see from that monstrous mark upon her face.  She needs attention at once.  I demand something be done."  She was in a self-righteous rage now, and her wiry finger shook as she pointed at Malfoy.

     "I am quite aware of what happened, Professor McGonagall," he said crisply, and something in his tone silenced her.  She lowered her pointing finger, and her shoulders slumped.  "Now, let us proceed to my office, so that the affair may be sorted out satisfactorily."

     "But Stan-,"

      "I quite agree with Professor Snape in this instance, Professor.  Miss Stanhope appears none the worse for wear after her experience.  A bruise never killed anyone as far as I can recall, and I have lived for a very long time.  The others, however, clearly do need seeing to."  He turned to the High Table.  "Madam Pomfrey, would you please join us in my office as soon as possible?"

     Madam Pomfrey's voice carried from her seat at the High Table.  "Right away, Headmaster."

     To the assembled band of groaning, dismayed students, he said, "Everyone please follow me."  

     The crowd of students parted reverently as the Headmaster swept past.  Most were convinced that the ragtag group of pupils following in his wake would be on the train to King's Cross by midday.  In the case of Draco Malfoy, few considered this a bad thing; indeed, there was much private jubilation at the thought.  Fred and George Weasley, though, would be a terrible loss.  Bright and popular and Beaters on the Gryffindor Quidditch team, they were regarded by many as a happy fixture at Hogwarts.  Hogwarts without the Weasley twins was like summer without sunshine.  About the possible departure of Stanhope and the others, there was bland apathy.

     The retinue made an odd sight as they marched through the deserted corridors to the Headmaster's office.  Malfoy walked with his back bent, as though burdened by a great weight, his broken hand cradled on his stomach.  Fred came behind him, surreptitiously cupping his nose, which bubbled dark red blood with every breath.  George was beside him, wincing at his swollen eye.  Seamus came next, uninjured but dazed with the growing realization that he was in very serious trouble.  Crabbe and Goyle came next, for once not by their master's side, each wearing expressions of dim alarm.  Bringing up the rear was Rebecca sandwiched between Snape and McGonagall.  It looked like the processional to an execution.

     Rolling between the two ominously silent teachers was not an experience she relished.  The air sizzled with tension, crackling between them like electrical current down an overheated wire.  Clearly, the conversation between them in the Great Hall had not been an exchange of morning pleasantries.  She risked a glance up at them as they walked, praying that neither one would notice her attention.  McGonagall was striding rapidly along, her lips pressed together so tightly they were all but invisible.  She looked neither to the left nor to the right; her gaze remained fixed on the Headmaster's back as he moved ever closer to the entrance to his office.

     To her left, Snape stalked beside her, hands balled into loose fists at his side.  His wand jutted from between his fingers like a wooden exclamation point.  The muscles of his jaw worked, and even from where she sat, she could hear his teeth grinding together like dried bones.  His black eyes burned with offended, seething fury.  Unexpectedly, they darted to her upturned face.  "What is it, Miss Stanhope?"  He did not slow down.

     Caught by surprise, she fumbled for an answer.  "Nothing, sir.  I thought you had spoken," she muttered, dropping her gaze to the safer territory of her lap.

     "Is your hearing amiss as well?  Perhaps you should see Madam Pomfrey.  I said nothing.  Rest assured I will have plenty to say shortly."  At this, Professor McGonagall's head swiveled in his direction, but she remained silent, for which Rebecca was profoundly glad.  The idea of things escalating out of control with her trapped between them made her mouth go dry and her stomach feel loose and hot.

     She was acutely aware of the Potions Master's dark eyes on the back of her head as they moved through the hall.  It was a disquieting feeling, and she made an effort not to break into nervous, warbling song.  The intensity of his gaze was disturbing.  If she raised her head, she knew she would see those black marble eyes scouring her face, glittering with hostility and smug triumph at having a chance to disgrace her in front of Headmaster Dumbledore.  They had weight, a prickling pressure against her scalp and the nape of her neck that made her flush and shiver at the same time.

     _Now is not the time t'be moonin' over your Potions professor's eyes, _came her grandfather's gruff voice.  _You need to be thinkin' of a way out of this mess._

     The idea of mooning over dour, unpleasant Professor Snape struck her as ludicrous, and though she knew it was unwise in the present circumstances, a small, strangled, scoffing titter escaped her.  Snape was on her in a second, the crisp snap of starched cotton echoing through the halls as he turned to her and bent down, his pallid face scant inches from hers.  A few glistening beads of sweat stood out on his sallow upper lip, and his breath, smelling faintly of doughy pastry and sweet cream butter, danced lightly on the tip of her nose.

     "_You_ are in very serious trouble, Miss Stanhope.  I fail to see anything amusing about your predicament whatsoever.  Would you care to enlighten the rest of us?"  He gestured at the rest of the group, who was watching them with morbid interest.

     _I doubt you find anything amusing about anything_, she thought wryly.  She prudently kept this thought to herself.  To utter it aloud would be akin to performing _Avada Kedavra _on herself.  Snape was far too constipated a man to appreciate or forgive such a retort.  Oh, this line of thought was leading to the formation of most unwholesome images.  Her mouth twitched, and she bit down on a wave of giddy laughter.  Her jaw creaked with the effort.

     "I'll ask you again, Miss Stanhope, what is so amusing?"  His voice was quiet, the bubbling, grinding, building hiss of faraway river water as it swelled to catastrophic rapids just before plunging over the falls.

     She mustered the last flagging remnants of her self-control and sat as stiffly as a poker in her chair.  "Nothing, sir," she said, passing a limp hand over her mouth to hide a final rebellious upturning of the corner of her lips.  "Just an involuntary muscle spasm."

     "Indeed.  Are you laughing at me?" he asked in a queerly flat tone.  His inkwell eyes were hard and speculative.

     She sensed the tightly controlled anger behind his bland face and casual inflection, and the last vestiges of her amusement evaporated.  "Absolutely not, sir."  _I would never be that damned stupid._

     "Good.  Most wise of you."  He rose and resumed his journey to the Headmaster's office.  

     The Headmaster stopped before the stone gargoyle and gave the password.  Draco, she noted with private glee, was looking positively ill.  Apparently, it had taken this long for the gravity of the situation to catch up with him.  Bit slow on the uptake, then.  Fred was still trying vainly to staunch the bleeding from his broken nose, and George was gingerly massaging the black and purple goose egg that had sprouted just below his eye.  Seamus seemed to be mentally composing his last will and testament.  His lips moved in silent prayer.

     She felt bad for Seamus, sorry that he had gotten dragged into this.  He hadn't actually done anything, after all; his lunge at Goyle had missed by a good six inches.  If he received punishment, it would essentially be for dropping his fork.  The rest of them, herself included, were the ones who had started the whole thing, and they deserved whatever they had coming to them.  It was a shame an innocent bystander had to go down with them.  She shot him a sympathetic look and was rewarded with a thin smile.  That was good.  At least he wasn't going to throttle her the minute Dumbledore let them go.

     "Follow me now.  Single file, no jostling.  Quickly, quickly."  Dumbledore disappeared in a scarlet flourish, and the others trailed dutifully in his wake.

     She rode the spiral staircase for the second time in as many weeks.  Now that she knew what to expect, it was really rather pleasant, and she took comfort in the knowledge that if the Levitation Charm should fail and send her crashing to her death, at least she'd take that bastard Snape with her.  Her life would be well-spent.  She smiled cheerfully in the dark.

     The confines of the spiral staircase were very cramped, and as a result, Professor Snape was nearly standing on the back of her chair.  The rub of his agonizingly starched robes across the back of her head was oddly comforting.  If she hadn't known all too well exactly who was standing behind her, she would have let her head sink into its rigid folds.  It smelled of dust and allspice, a strangely homey smell.  It was an incongruous feeling, being comforted by the presence of a man she was growing to fear and despise, and yet it was so, and she did not fight it.  She had seen stranger things in this life.

     Home and comfort were not two things usually associated with Severus Snape, and if he had known that Rebecca was harboring such thoughts about him, he would have regarded her with even more suspicion than he already held for her.  As it was, he was too busy fulminating wrathfully on her infuriating impudence and damnable stubbornness.  The finely-tuned wheels of his mind whirred as he prepared his accusations and proposed punishment.  McGonagall would make things difficult; she always did.  She was always interfering, always meddling in his attempts to see Gryffindors properly brought to task for their actions, especially when it came to the Potter boy.  His eyes narrowed as he recalled the numerous scrapes and clashes he had had with Minerva over the years about Saint Potter and his merry band of juvenile delinquents.  Each and every time he was sure he had finally found a foolproof way to at least see him upbraided or subjected to temporary removal from the Quidditch team, he always discovered a means to slip the noose at the last moment.  Minerva was constantly excusing his atrocious behavior, sweeping it under the rug, treating it as a minor quibble.  Albus was no small help in the matter, either, though he couldn't go accusing the Headmaster and man who had given him a second chance at life of blatant favoritism, even if it was as prominent as the nose on your sallow face.  That would not do.

     Damn Potter.  The boy was crucial to the defeat of Voldemort, perhaps its only hope, and the problem was, he knew it.  With each year and each new spectacular defeat of the most powerful Dark wizard in history, he grew more quietly cocksure, more certain of his invincibility.  Each year his flouting of rules that had been in place for millennia grew more brazen, more flagrant.  The death of Cedric Diggory at the end of the Tri-Wizard Tournament last year had knocked him down a peg or two, but it wouldn't last long.  He would recover himself in a remarkably short period of time.  Boys like him always did.

     Now he had another stubborn, arrogant troublemaker on his hands.  Well, he was going to take control of this one before things got out of hand.  This one wasn't going to get away with breaking the rules and trampling his authority as a teacher.  He was going to break her back right here and now.  She was going to learn to respect him and to toe the line if it killed her.  Which, given her condition, might not be entirely out of the question.

     That being said, he could more than guess what had happened.  Whenever Malfoy and the Weasleys came together, trouble usually followed.  No doubt Draco had decided to stir up a spot of trouble to start off his day and chosen the twins and Miss Stanhope as his target.  The Weasleys had been his favorite sport since his arrival at Hogwarts; their poverty attracted his lazy malice the way a bright light attracted fluttering moths.  He could no more stop tormenting them than the moths could avoid the light.  It was a fundamental law of nature.  Unfortunately for him, he had not taken the addition of stiff-necked Stanhope into account, and the end result had not turned out well for anyone involved.

     Frankly, he was amazed by the action Stanhope had taken.  He had looked up from his poached eggs and griddle cakes in time to see the white blur of her wiry hand dart out and smash the cinnamon bun into his smirking, unsuspecting face.  He was so surprised that an unseemly grunt of astonishment had nearly escaped him.  In all his years of glib bullying, no one besides Potter and his cronies had ever challenged young Malfoy.  Most were content to tuck their tails between their legs and count themselves lucky.  He would have wagered his salary that Stanhope would do the same.  A person like her should keep as low a profile as possible, not draw dangerous attention to herself.

     He had to admit, though, that he felt a miserly flicker of disgusted admiration for it.  She had bollocks, that was certain.  Whether she demonstrated any appreciable common sense was another issue.  Draco was a vindictive little git; he would make sure she paid dearly for her little moment of glory.  Whether he went running to his father and made an international incident of it, or whether he bided his time and struck without warning, he would extract his pound of flesh.  No one ever laid their hands on a Malfoy without penalty.

     Lucius.  Damn, did this ever complicate matters.  Leave it to Stanhope to create more trouble for him.  Malfoy had struck a fellow student; moreover he had struck one who could not defend herself-at least that's how it would look.  He had a feeling she was tougher than she appeared.  Evidently, if the reaction of his colleagues was any indication, he was alone in that belief.  Whatever the case, there was no getting around this.  Draco was going to be punished.

     The only saving grace in this, the only thing which might allow him to keep his dignity as a teacher and stay out of trouble with Malfoy and Voldemort, was the fact that, as Slytherin Head of House, it would be up to him to determine that punishment.  Suspension or expulsion was not an option.  Even if the student involved were not so prominent as Draco, those possibilities would not be considered.  Skirmishes between the Houses were not uncommon, though they usually entailed wands rather than fists and revolved around more pressing things like Quidditch, or catching your paramour snogging someone else in a darkened corridor.  No matter the penalty he imposed, McGonagall would complain it was far too lax.  That was all right; he had been defusing her ire for years and knew exactly which buttons to push with the fierce Gryffindor matriarch. 

     Rebecca was among the last to enter the Headmaster's office, and she found that it no longer possessed any of its former inviting charm.  The atmosphere in the room was thick with tension, laced with an undercurrent of fear.  The Headmaster sat at his desk, solemn and silent.  The other participants in the morning soiree of bedlam sat in front of the desk or stood at stiff attention, rocking back and forth on their heels.  They studied the floor, hoping to divine their fortunes from the intricate pattern of the rich plum Oriental rug that carpeted the hard stone floor.  Rebecca joined them, pulling alongside Fred to complete the motley crew that clustered before the silent, contemplative Dumbledore.  The sleeve of Professor Snape's robe slithered brusquely over her cheek as he swept past her to stand beside the desk, the gleeful executioner presenting his charges for sacrifice.  McGonagall took up her post on the opposite side, her face taut and strained with anger and concern.

     The door opened again, and Madam Pomfrey bustled in.  Rebecca knew what was coming even before she saw the nurse make a beeline for her.  She would have laughed had she not been so disgusted.  Ignoring the bleeding noses and broken limbs of the other inhabitants of the room, the Mediwitch set about prodding and probing her face with gumption.  It never failed.  Otherwise sensible and level-headed medical professionals were reduced to tunnel-visioned mother hens anytime she happened to get so much as a surface scratch.

     "Sorry, Fred.  Looks like you'll just have to bleed to death," she said drily.

     Madam Pomfrey tutted, unappreciative of her humor.  George snickered, wincing as his swelling bruise throbbed.  Snape was not amused.  "Silence," he snarled.  "Your cheek is neither wanted nor advisable."

     _Neither is ignoring more severely injured students to make sure you don't suffer your first bruise fatality._  She was grateful for the temporary reprieve, though.  It was an opportunity to think, and free from the oppressive weight of Professor Snape's baleful stare, her nimble mind was hard at work exploring all the possibilities, examining them like bits of ore, discarding those that shone falsely beneath logic's light and hoarding close those that twinkled with the promise of pardon.  One in particular caught her eye.

     It was not a rare gem, this thought that the eye of her mind seized upon so greedily.  It was as old as infirmity, an ancient chestnut used by D.A.I.M.S. students since time immemorial.  It was a weapon passed along from one generation to the next, covert information passed from the lips of one convict to another behind jailhouse doors, lore of the oldest, most reliable sort.  It was unscrupulous, yes, but successful, and that was all that mattered.  And if it could fool the trained eyes at D.A.I.M.S., there was little limit to what it could do among those who knew no better.

     _Are you really gonna do it?  _Her grandfather again.

     _I think so._

_     Think careful on this now.  This isn't fair t'the others._

_     One of the first things you ever taught me was that life wasn't fair._

_     Yes, girl, I did, but I di' not raise you to be like this._

_     Oh, yes, you did.  Whether you meant to or not, you did.  You told me to do whatever I had to to survive._

_     Yes, but to live always with honor and dignity.  I never taught you to lie._

_     I want to stay here.  It's as simple as that.  I'll do whatever it takes.  And if I can screw Malfoy in the process, all the better.  _

_     What about Fred, George, and Seamus?  Are you goin' t'leave them to Fate, then?_

She looked at the three of them sitting in suffering silence and felt a pang of guilt.  They had only gotten into this because of her, and it seemed wrong to leave them hanging now.  The vision of Hogwarts fading into the twilight mist as the carriage returned her to the train station in Hogsmeade made her heart wrench.  She wanted so badly to stay here.  Torn between her desire and what was right, she saw Draco Malfoy's face.  The pendulum swung.

     _I can't help them._  Behind the face that was still being scrutinized by Madam Pomfrey, a draconian smile.

     _No better than Malfoy, then?_

     That jibe hit its mark.  The draconian smile faded, replaced by uncertainty.  _It wouldn't be like that._

     _Yes, it would.  You think he gives a fig for those two slack-jawed toadies of his?  Don't you believe it.  He'll hang them out to dry faster than you can blink.  You'll do no better if you leave those three lads swinging in the wind._

She was better than Draco Malfoy, but the temptation was so strong.  With just one little lie, she could slither from the noose and retreat to safety, where she could watch the arrogant snob get his comeuppance.  But that would mean leaving her new friends behind, deserting like a rat from a foundering ship.  What to do?

     _Maybe not,_ said the cold voice of self-preservation in her head.  _Maybe you can get them all out of trouble if you play your cards right.  These people _don't_ know anything about you.  You can weave whatever fairytale you wish, and unless Madam Pomfrey has amassed a great deal of knowledge in a very short time, they won't be able to prove a thing._

_     Snape will.  And Dumbledore.  They're not stupid._

_     No, but neither are you._

_     I'm smart enough to know I can't outwit them._

_     You give yourself far too little credit.  Listen, you're right about Dumbledore.  The man knows everything; he must have eyes in the back of his head and in places it is impolite to discuss.  Snape is a different animal.  He knows as little as the rest, no matter how much he thunders and blusters to the contrary._

_     That still leaves the Headmaster, _she countered, determined to play this mental chessgame to the end.

     _It does, but that is a risk you will have to take.  If it works, the payoff will be enormous._

_     If it doesn't, I'll have the rest of my life to think about it._

_     Are you a gambler or not?_

At long, blessed last, Madam Pomfrey pronounced her verdict-she would live.

     "What an earth-shattering observation," observed Snape flatly.  Madam Pomfrey shot him a wounded, offended glance.

     Rebecca felt like clapping and cheering.  For once, she and Snape were of the same mind.  "Thank you, Madam Pomfrey," she said.  If she didn't, she was going to laugh.

     "You're welcome, dear," she sniffed.  

     It took no time at all for the assorted injuries of the others to be remedied.  With a swish and flick of her wand, Pomfrey mended Fred's broken nose, George's swollen lump, and-much to Rebecca's disappointment-Malfoy's broken hand.  

     Pomfrey replaced her wand and straightened.  She turned to Dumbledore, who had watched the proceedings without a word.  "Will you be needing anything else, sir?"

     "No, no, Poppy.  You've done a splendid job.  Thank you," he assured her warmly.

     Madam Pomfrey left, shooting Snape a take-that-you-cad look before closing the door.

     "Now," the Headmaster said when she was gone, "who would like to tell me precisely what happened this morning?"  All the warmth had left his voice.

     Feet shuffled.  McGonagall tapped a rolled parchment on the palm of her hand.  Snape straightened his robes and sneered, daring someone to step forward.  Sand shifted through the hourglass behind the desk.  Fawkes sedately ruffled his feathers.

     Finally, Rebecca raised a wavering hand.  "I would, sir."  From the corner of her eye, she saw Snape lean forward, a panther gathering its haunches to spring.  She took a deep breath.  "It was an accident, sir."  The die was cast.

     "An accident?"  The Headmaster sat back in his chair and pushed his spectacles onto the bridge of his nose.  

     _Here goes nothing._  "Yes, sir.  You see, Malfoy and I got into a spat on the train, and he was bringing me the cinnamon bun as a peace offering.  Unfortunately, just as I reached out to accept his generous gift, I had a spasm and smashed it into his face."

     Draco was on his feet.  "That's a lie!  She hit me deliberately," he protested, jabbing an emphatic finger in her direction.

     "Please sit down, Mr. Malfoy," said Dumbledore calmly.  "Now, what were you doing by the Gryffindor table then, if not making a peace offering as Miss Stanhope claims?"

     Malfoy opened his mouth and closed it with a snap.  She could see his mind working as he tried to make sense of this unexpected turn of events.  His eyes narrowed, and then he said, "I was going to offer the cinnamon bun as a peace offering, sir, that's true, but she laughed at me, and then she hit me with the bun."  He was trembling with outrage.

     "Are you absolutely certain it was deliberate, Mr. Malfoy?"  Dumbledore asked shrewdly.

     "Well…yes," he said, thrusting out his narrow chin.

     "An odd reaction to a peace offering, don't you think?"

     "Stanhope hasn't exactly acted as one would expect since her arrival, Headmaster," Snape interjected quietly.  "Non-traditional House placement, a house elf, specialized equipment.  Perhaps all the preferential treatment has caused her to believe she need not adhere to school rules.  A lesson to the contrary may be in order."

     Dumbledore pushed up his sleeves and looked at the looming Potions Master.  "Ah, did you see what happened, Severus?" he asked.  "Good.  At last we can get to the truth of the matter."

     Snape's mouth thinned.  "Unfortunately, no, Headmaster.  I was enjoying my breakfast.  I looked up in time to see Draco's retaliatory action."

     "Then you cannot say for certain whether or not Stanhope acted with malice?"

     Snape's mouth pursed, as though he had bitten into a particularly sour lemon.  "No, but I think it can be safely inferred that-,"

     "From some of my conduct, it could be safely inferred that I was mad as a hatter," interrupted Dumbledore placidly.  "No, we must stick with the facts at hand, and so far the only fact we have indisputably established is that Mr. Malfoy was attempting a peace offering."  At this, he eyed both Draco and Rebecca skeptically.  "We have yet to ask anyone else what happened.  Fred?  George?"

     The twins exchanged glances.  Rebecca's duplicity had caught them off guard.  They were merry pranksters, accustomed to innocent fun and harmless frivol.  Lying to the Headmaster, a man they respected very much, was not something they had never considered, and yet the choice stood before them now.  If they told the truth and contradicted Rebecca, she would be in a world of trouble, possibly facing expulsion.  If they went along with the ruse and were discovered, they would be in hock themselves, and with their father an employee at the Ministry, they could expect trouble at home.

     Honestly, they couldn't understand what she was up to.  Why hadn't she just told the truth?  It would have been no worse for them if she had.  They had thrown punches; they would get detention and letters sent home to their parents, no matter how well-intentioned their part in the melee had been.  Lying complicated matters exponentially.  They did not know yet her penchant for holding a venomous grudge, nor did they comprehend the lengths to which she would go to see her enemies swing.  If they had, their fondness for her would have been profoundly tempered.  They didn't find out until much later, and by then it was far too late.

     "Yes, sir?" they said, trying to buy time and gather their thoughts.

     "You were there.  What happened?"

     "It was just as she said, sir," George answered.

     "Headmaster, this is ridiculous.  These boys are clearly lying to protect her."  Snape was pacing like a caged wildcat beside the desk, staring at Rebecca with undisguised loathing.

     This brought McGonagall to her feet.  "Don't be ridiculous, Professor Snape.  Fred and George Weasley are mischievous and more than a little lax, but they are not now, nor have they ever been liars.  What reason would they have to lie, especially for Stanhope?"

     Snape gave a lopsided, smug smile.  "For the same reason that you saw fit to try and send her to the Hospital Wing for a simple bruise."

     Dumbledore cut off McGonagall's retort.  "Crabbe?  Goyle?  Seamus?  Have you anything to add?"

     Crabbe and Goyle, lost without Draco's guidance, could only make incoherent noises of confusion and shake their heads.  Seamus merely shrugged.  The less he said, the better, in his opinion.

     Dumbledore sat back in his chair and sighed.  "It seems we have reached an impasse.  Somewhere in all this lies the truth, but if no one is willing to stand up for it, then you leave me no choice but turn the matter over to your Heads of Houses for punishment."

     Professor McGonagall cleared her throat.  "Well, I think it's obvious that Miss Stanhope deserves no reprimand.  She's been through enough trauma already.  She clearly meant no harm."

     "Whether she meant to inflict harm or not is irrelevant," countered Snape coolly.  "The fact remains that she did, and for that she must be punished."

     "But she cannot help it if her body does something beyond her control."

      "A drunk man often cannot control his mouth.  Does that give him the right to behave like an ass at a pub, perhaps start a bar brawl?  And if today was a small example of the sort of mishap that can happen when she loses control of herself, then I strongly suggest we re-evaluate having her here in the first place.  Would you accept responsibility if she happens to blow up three-quarters of the school because of her lack of control?"

     "That's hardly fair," she sniffed.

     "Neither is letting her escape punishment simply because she is disabled," he pointed out.

     "Professor Snape is right.  No matter how unfortunate the circumstances, I'm afraid Miss Stanhope must take responsibility for her part in the affair.  Therefore, you must render a decision, Professor McGonagall."

     Snape inclined his head in agreement, a triumphant smirk upon his lips.  McGonagall thought for a moment, rubbing her hands together slowly.  "I suppose a detention is in order, as well as a letter to her parents," she said at last.

     "Very well," Dumbledore said, looking relieved that this mess was nearing an end.  "As for the others?"  He nodded in the direction of the twins and Seamus.

     "The same.  I see no reason for a deduction of House points.  They were reacting to what they saw as a threat to a vulnerable fellow student."

     "Professor Snape, what do you plan to do about members of your House that took part in this incident?" asked the Headmaster, whose eyes were slowly regaining their customary twinkle.

     "I think a letter to the parents will be sufficient for all three boys," he said smoothly.

     McGonagall was immediately outraged.  "Absolutely not!  If Miss Stanhope is to take responsibility for her actions, then Mr. Malfoy must take responsibility for his," she fumed.

     "But Malfoy was only acting in self-defense.  He was not the aggressor here."  Snape's voice was almost too low to be heard.

     "Defense against what?  A cinnamon bun?  Merlin, I had no idea they were such a deadly weapon," McGonagall shot back, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

     Dumbledore held up his hands in a placatory gesture.  "Professors, please."  Both fell silent and turned to look at him.  "Professor McGonagall is right.  You cannot have it both ways, Severus; if you insist on Miss Stanhope shouldering part of the blame, then young Mr. Malfoy must bear his share as well.  What will it be?"

     "I suppose a detention is in order," Snape muttered in a tone that suggested he would rather pass a kidney stone.  "Goyle will receive detention and a letter.  There is no evidence to show that Crabbe was involved at all, and therefore I find punishment unnecessary."

     Dumbledore nodded.  "Agreed.  Is that arrangement satisfactory, Professor McGonagall?"

     McGonagall, looking as though nothing short of public flagellation would do, gave a curt nod.  "Yes, Headmaster."

     "Excellent.  Then I consider this matter closed.  All students may proceed to their classes, but I must ask you, Professors, to remain behind a moment."  He smiled at the students.  "Off you go."

     When the students were gone, Snape turned to Dumbledore, his cold black eyes darting to the hourglass behind his desk.  "Headmaster, it is nearly time for the first class of the day.  I have never been late for a single lesson in my life, not even as a student, and I do not intend to allow the actions of a few undisciplined Gryffindors to change that."

     "Need I remind you that Gryffindor was not the only House involved?"  McGonagall bristled, her eyes flashing dangerously behind her spectacles.

     "Not to worry, Severus, you will both be in your classrooms on time, I assure you.  I only wanted to ask that you both refrain from squabbling in front of the students.  It won't do to have the very people charged with teaching and caring for them acting like one of them.  In the future, please keep all disagreements between yourselves and behind closed doors.  Is that clear?"

     "Of course, Headmaster," came McGonagall's contrite reply.  "It won't happen again."  Snape's mouth twitched, but he said nothing.

     "Severus?"

     Snape gave a curt nod and looked impatiently at the hourglass again.

     "All right, Severus.  That is all."  Snape was gone before Dumbledore's lips had fully closed.

     "Good day, Headmaster," said McGonagall politely, scowling disapprovingly at the space where Snape had been.  Then she was gone, stalking briskly from the room with a derisive snort.

     When she was gone, Dumbledore sighed and gently kneaded his temples with his fingertips.  That had been the most disagreeable fracas he'd had to sort out in some years, the worst since a young Hufflepuff named Aloyiusius McGriff had tried to romance an unwilling Ravenclaw sixth-year named Dominia Crowler ten years ago.  A mess that had been.  _This _had been little better.  His two finest professors fighting like truculent first-years hadn't helped.  _Merlin._  He was used to a certain amount of stubborn petulance from Snape, but Minerva's behavior had been shocking, a far cry from her usually calm, level-headed demeanor.  She had been hostile and accusatory, outright baiting Snape more than once.  Odd.  

     Part of her defensiveness stemmed, no doubt, from a strong desire to protect Stanhope.  He couldn't say he blamed her.  He himself felt that impulse every time he looked at her and saw her withered frame perched in that rolling armchair like a dried-apple doll.  She was undeniably fragile, held together, it seemed by bull-headed optimism.  It was all he could do not to enfold her in powerful protective magic and hide her in the safety of his office.

     Yet…yet.  He was not entirely convinced that everything about her was as it appeared.  There were times, like his first interview with her and the meeting just now, when he sensed incredible power in her.  Not magical power, no; he had seen scores of pupils with far more magical power than her, but an indefinable aura of staunch intractability, of staggering recalcitrance.  Severus sensed it, too, which was probably why she was driving him insane.  It was a sort of joie de guerre.  The greater the conflict, the more vital she grew.  Her mind thrived on the pressure.  It was astounding, really.

     He slowly spun her chair away from the wall, meandering along the train of his thoughts.  He hoped she could hold up.  Whether she was aware of it or not, the world around her was about to be plunged into unspeakable upheaval.  She was going to need every ounce of that steel-spined stubbornness just to survive.  So would they all.  He smiled sadly, watching thoughtfully as the Sneakoscope hidden on the wall wobbled dreamily in the stillness.

     Unaware of the rumination going on several floors above her head, Rebecca rolled in the direction of Arithmancy with Professor Vector.  Though she was disappointed not to have wiggled out of punishment entirely, she was relieved to know that neither she nor her friends would be on the next train home.  All in all, it had been worth it to smash that cinnamon bun into Malfoy's face.

     A shadow fell over her as she rolled.  She recognized the sharp, cruel tap of hard-soled boots behind her.  "Miss Stanhope."

     "Yes, Professor Snape?"  She stopped and turned to face him.

     His pale hand reached out to clamp her shoulder in a vise grip.  "I suppose you think you were terribly clever in there?"

     Instinctively, she put up her protective walls.  He was livid.  "I don't know what you mean, sir," she answered, honestly perplexed.

     He bent down so that they were nose to nose.  His hand squeezed her shoulder, the closely cropped nails digging into her robes.  His eyes were flat, unreadable pools.  The smell of allspice was positively cloying.  "Oh, yes.  Yes…you…do."  He enunciated each word as though it were a terrible curse.  "And I promise you, child, I'll make sure you pay for it."

     She could only gawk at him in stunned silence.  He was gripping her shoulder so tightly that her arm burned and throbbed, and a heavy numbness was rippling down her arm in an icy wave.  "Professor Snape, please, sir you're hurting me," she said, trying desperately to keep an edge of panic out of her voice.

     He looked at her scornfully for a moment, and then his gaze fell on his hand ruthlessly grinding the thin bones of her shoulder together.  He jerked away from her as though struck by a Tingling Curse, and for just a moment she saw the look of dazed horror on his face.  Then the blank wall came crashing down again.  He stood up and straightened his robe with the offending hand.  His fingers twitched, and he rubbed them compulsively against his palm, as though trying to rid them of a particularly noisome bit of muck or an invisible stain.  "I'll see you in detention, Miss Stanhope," he said stiffly.  He swung away from her and stalked toward his classroom, running his long fingers through his lank hair as he disappeared.

     Arithmamcy was her favorite subject.  It was a discipline of the mind.  It really didn't require a body, per se.  As long as you understood the concepts involved, you could be a talking head.  Professor Vector was an annoyance.  His voice got in the way of her intense concentration, and so she tuned him out.  As his voiced faded, so did the sharp, pulsing ache in her shoulder.  She wandered the inner corridors of her mind, letting the incantations swirl through her consciousness, picking up the luminous threads of the unlimited maybes of the world and holding their shimmering ends in her hands and letting them fall.  She never looked at them, never explored the kernels of glowing possibility they held.  She understood the danger in that, the tantalizing, seductive power in holding all the worlds that could be in her hands.  It was enough for now to know that she _could._

     By lunch, the pain in her shoulder was a hammering spike.  She had trouble just bringing her fork or goblet to her mouth, and when Fred inadvertently jostled her reaching for another slice of kidney pie, she bit her tongue to hold back a scream.  She should have gone to Pomfrey, but she was too afraid to ruffle Snape's feathers again today.  She tried to move it as little as possible and preoccupied herself by drinking goblet after goblet of pumpkin juice.  Sooner than she would have liked, it was time to make the grudging trip to the dungeons where she spent so much of her time.

     She should have gone to the Hospital Wing and let Madam Pomfrey fuss over her.  She should have turned tail and run to the safety of Gryffindor Tower, to the comfort of Winky and her solicitous little voice.  She should have done anything but step into the Potions classroom that afternoon.  She knew it as soon as she crossed the threshold into the dismal, musty room.  Her neck went taut, and the sensitive skin there prickled in rough gooseflesh.  Snape's seething anger permeated the room, clinging to the walls like a thick wool blanket.  _Get out of here, _her mind whispered, but it was too late.  Snape had already seen her.  She pulled up to her desk and tried to ignore the knot of unease cramping her too-full stomach.

     He was more cutting, vicious, and vituperative than she had ever seen him.  He stalked around the classroom snarling and snapping at anyone within range.  Even the Slytherins were on the brunt of his steel velvet tongue; he reduced a gangly fifth-year girl to sniveling tears for the minute infraction of letting her spoon clank against her cauldron.  The room was stifling with the tension.  Even Malfoy was quiet.

     He was unrelenting.  He criticized every aspect of her potion, from its consistency to its color to the way she ground her thyme.  If he could, she was sure he would reprimand her manner of breathing.  To compound the problem, the pain her arm was a ravenous, sawing throb.  Each motion of her hand sent a bolt of agony clawing from her shoulder to her wrist.  She gritted her teeth against it, knowing she would receive no quarter from Snape today.

     Though he was as demanding as ever, she sensed a subtle change in him.  He was reluctant to come near her, keeping at least three feet between them, his customary crowding loom forgotten.  It was strange to see him like that after two weeks of growing to know his moods and habits.  He was betraying nothing, as stern and tight-lipped as ever, but his moments were uneasy around her, stiff and ungraceful.  _Is he that angry at me? _she thought, _or is he afraid?_  Now that was an odd thought.  Professor Snape wasn't the type to be easily spooked as far as she could see.  Had the incident in the corridor upset him that much?

     Things might have turned out all right in spite of Snape's infectious gloom if her bladder hadn't chosen just that moment to protest against the massive quantity of pumpkin juice she had so unwisely quaffed at lunch.  The tight heaviness in her groin made her wince.  _Please not now._  She could hold out.  Asking Snape if she could be excused to the bathroom was handing him an engraved invitation to embarrassment and ridicule.  Not to mention the fun Draco would have with such an announcement.  He would laugh and hoot himself sick, and Snape sure as hell wasn't going to do anything to stop him.

     Twenty minutes later, the urge to urinate was overwhelming.  Her bladder and shoulder were singing in tandem, and she was nauseated with the dull weight in her lower belly.  If she didn't go to the bathroom soon, she was going to have an accident.  She raised her hand.

     It was five long minutes before Professor Snape's oil slick eyes flicked upward, one eyebrow arching in bored inquiry.  "Yes, Miss Stanhope?"

     "Please. Sir, may I go to the restroom?  Her earlobes burned.

     The predictable guffaw came from Draco, perched in his corner like a malevolent, gilded falcon.  From Snape there was silence, the granite white mask of his face impenetrable to her careful scrutiny.  Ghostly hands rubbed together with a dry hiss.  "To the bathroom?"  Thoughtful.  The heads of her fellow students lifted from the steaming vapors and swiveled to watch the dance that was rapidly becoming commonplace between them.  This time, they had joined the dance in the middle and seemed to know it.  She knew it, too.  Draco was watchful in his corner.  Beside her, Neville Longbottom's nostrils flared delicately, like a hare scenting the first acrid plumes of brushfire smoke.

     "Yes, sir, the bathroom."  One, two, three, one, two, three.

     "You were at lunch before this?"  He walked with slow deliberation from behind his lectern.  Turn and step.  Careful not to trip.

     "Yes, sir."  One, two.  Dull heat radiated from her anguished bladder.

     "Then you had more than ample time to go to the lavatory."  Spin, step.

     "Yes, sir, but I did not have to go then."  One.

     "I am not responsible for your lack of anticipation or your poor judgment.  Your lack of foresight is your problem.  You may not waste my valuable time traipsing off to the loo."  The dancers broke apart.  Snape's attention returned to his lectern.

     The next twenty minutes were a blur of breathless prayer and uncomfortable shifting as she put up a Herculean effort to stem the swelling tide sloshing ominously inside her overtaxed bladder and kidneys.  Her groin clenched to hold back its restless contents.  Aggravated by the tension thrumming through her body in a ceaseless rush, her shoulder sang an aria of protest.  A warning spasm jolted her, and against her better judgment, she raised her hand again.

     Snape looked at her expressionlessly for a full three minutes before acknowledging her.  "Yes?"

     "Sir, I really need to use the bathroom."

      He set his quill down with a quiet click.  "I believe we have discussed this matter already.  You made the decision not to go when you had the opportunity.  Now you will live with the consequences of that decision."

     "But, sir-,"

     "Ten points for your obstinacy.  If you ask me again, we shall return to the Headmaster's office forthwith."

     It happened while she was macerating her newt eggs in vinegar.  There was a rippling convulsion and then the warm gush of liquid over her thighs and down her legs.  The only thing she could think was, _Please don't let them hear the piss dribbling onto the floor.  Let Neville blow something to kingdom come._  But for once in his life, Neville was breezing through his Potions assignment.  His cauldron remained intact.  Everyone heard the hissing patter of hot urine dribbling onto the floor.

     Neville, being closest to her, was the first to notice.  He looked at her, then down at the rapidly expanding pungent pool beneath her chair.  His eyes rounded in surprise, and she saw his far hand pull the hem of his robe from the threatening puddle as it seeped outward.  Though he tried to hide it, a flash of disgust crossed his face.  Then sympathy surfaced.  _God bless you, Neville Longbottom_.

     Draco, who had seen everything, called out in a shrill, triumphant voice, "Professor Snape, Rebecca's soiled herself."

     Snape, busy demolishing the work of a young Gryffindor girl on the opposite side of the room, replaced the ladle he had been holding in the cauldron and stalked over, his eyes glittering.  As he drew closer, his sensitive nose twitched, curling when it detected the pungent, citric, unmistakable reek of piss.

     "What is the meaning of this, Stanhope?" he hissed, his face a rictus of revulsion as he peered at the urine on the floor and then back at her.

     "I'm sorry, sir," she whispered, dropping her gaze from his burning face, "I just couldn't hold it any more."

     "Once more your lack of control has caused a calamity.  You've…defiled my classroom.  There are no words in the human language to express my disgust.  First you attempt to make me look foolish in front of the Headmaster with your fanciful tales, and now you void your bladder all over my room.  I have had enough of your behavior."  He conjured a bucket and scrub brush and dropped it onto her lap.  "Clean it up."

     "But-,"

     "You don't expect me to do it?  I'm not your mother; I am under no obligation to coddle you.  Clean it before your classmates become ill from breathing this stench."

     "But sir, I can't reach the ground from my chair with this brush."

     "Then I suppose you'll just have to get down on your knees and do it," he said with a nasty smirk.

     "But-,"

    "Now," he hissed through clenched teeth.  When she hesitated still longer, he roared, "NOW!"

     She pulled her chair away from the puddle and turned to face it.  It glowed eerily in the torchlight.  It was almost beautiful.  She turned the chair off, unclasped her safety belt, put the bucket on the floor, gripped the armrest with shaking hands, and pushed herself forward.  She fell out of the chair in an ungainly flop, landing less than an inch from the terrible golden pool.

     The pain from the impact was paralyzing, and she lay on the cold stone floor a moment, listening to the snickering laughter of the Slytherin side of the room.  Then Snape's tailored leather boot appeared at the edge of her vision.  His voice, a feathery lash from above.  "Well?  What are you waiting for?  If you're worried about getting filthy, it's a bit late for that.  Draco's strident laugh cut through the cottony silence.  Snape's boots clacked and disappeared from her line of sight.

     She pushed herself up on one elbow and reached into the pail for the scrub brush.  "Sir?  I need water."

     Snape pulled out his wand.  _"Aparecium water!"_  He went back to his desk.

     This close, the jungly smell of cold urine was overpowering, and she struggled to breathe through her mouth.  The golden ends of her hair dipped into the puddle and grew sodden and sticky.  The rough stone of the floor bit into her elbow like an auger, and she could feel it rubbing raw as the worn stone scoured it.

     Ten minutes later, the class was dismissed, and they filed past her, some clucking sympathetically, but most studiously avoiding looking at her hunched, struggling body.  She saw Harry Potter shoot Snape an ugly look, but he left without a word.  Draco lingered as he left, grinning down at her.  Suddenly, his foot jerked out and kicked over the bucket, spilling freezing water across the floor.

     "I'm so sorry, Professor," he said in mock horror.  "It was an accident."

     "Not to worry, Mr. Malfoy," said Snape calmly.

     Draco swaggered out the door.  She watched him leave with a barely concealed snarl.  Had her wand been close at hand, she would have hexed him into oblivion without hesitation, but it was trapped beneath the voluminous folds of her urine-soaked robes, and she was so tired that her aim would have been markedly off.  She concentrated on scrubbing the floor, an impossible task now that her water had been spilled. 

     Her back ached dully from the exertion of holding herself out of the now-freezing urine.  She was so cold; the stone floor was leeching the heat from her skin with parasitic greed.  Back and forth.  Back and forth.  The bristles of the scrub brush grated across the floor laboriously, rheumatically.  Her shoulder creaked, keeping the time of her punishment like a macabre internal clock, each jab of pain ticking off the seconds.

     All the while, she knew Snape was watching her with those mesmerizing, dead eyes, drinking in her suffering like the finest vintage.  His presence was as silent and painful as old memory, and she tried to block him from her thoughts, adding another layer to the unscalable walls of her defenses.  _I hate you_, she thought.  Then with more conviction, _I despise you._  Her frail body trembled with the force of feeling.  Her breath came in ragged gasps as she choked back a cry of frustrated defiance.

     _Keep your back stiff, girl.  Don' give in to him,_ came her grandfather's voice.

     "Like hell," she said, her voice too low for even Snape to hear.

     Snape was indeed watching her, but he felt no triumph as he stood over her just beyond the range of her sight.  He should have.  He should be congratulating himself on bringing another enemy low, but instead there was only a smoldering irritation tinged with…worry.  Something was wrong with her, though he couldn't say just what.  During the gross amount of time he'd spent with her, he had grown familiar with her odd movements and physical quirks.  She wasn't moving the way she should.  Her scrubbing arm was too tentative, too narrow in its arc.

     His mind returned to their meeting in the hallway.  He had grabbed her.  On that very shoulder.  He hadn't meant to.  In fact, until she'd spoken, he hadn't known he was holding her at all.  The only thing he remembered was a white-hot fury at the smug way she'd told a bold-faced lie in the Headmaster's office.  The next thing he could recall after that was her frightened face and her voice, small and apprehensive.  His mouth went dry.

     "Miss Stanhope," he said gruffly, "stop."

     The motion of her arm paused in mid-arc, and she looked up at him with a fogged-mirror gaze.  "Sir?"  Her voice was flat.

     He squatted on his haunches beside her.  He had to see.  "Hold out your arm."

     She didn't move.  She was contemplating him, assessing the risk.  He saw her eyes dart around the silent room, registering the fact that they were alone, that she was alone with the man that hated her more than anything else.  Her small, wasted fingers unfurled from around the brush one by one, and the tiny arm slowly stretched out for his inspection.

     He rolled up the sleeve of her robe and fought hard to stifle a groan of dismay at what he saw.  The flesh of her shoulder was puffy, and the skin was already ripening from an angry pink to a light purple.  By tonight, it would be a deep black.  The outline of a hand was clearly visible.  His hand.

     "Stay still," he ordered, and got to his feet.  He left her and retreated to his Potions cupboard.  He could feel her inquisitive eyes on his back.  Not doubt she was deciding whether or not he was going poison her.  Tempting, but no.  He rummaged around until he came upon the topical analgesic.  From the looks of that arm, she needed it, and whether he gave a damn for her or not, it was his responsibility to see that she was cared for.

     He returned to her side.  "Your arm," he said briskly.

     She eyed the bottle of brackish brown liquid dubiously.  Then the arm extended.  He noted the soft grunt of pain the action produced.  He gripped the thin wrist presented to him with gentle dexterity.  He could feel the brittle bones just beneath the skin and the hot flutter of her pulse as blood rushed through paper-thin veins toward her heart.  _She is so small, a thing of paper and prayer,_ he thought with dark amazement.  Then, _Yes, and she deserves no better treatment than anyone else._

     _And no worse._

     He opened the bottle with a deft motion of his thumb, and dripped a few drops of the astringent liquid onto the bruise.  She hissed as the stinging ointment made contact.  "Stop whinging," he barked, irritated by her ingratitude.  He recapped the bottle and set it on the floor.  Then he reached out and softly massaged the decoction into the skin, shooting her an irascible scowl when she flinched.  "You may go," he said when he was finished.

     "But the floor…"

     He pulled out his wand, nonchalantly muttered a Disappearing Charm, and the mess evaporated.  "I'll see you in detention, Miss Stanhope."

     "Sir, I can't get back in my chair without help.  Permission to use magic?"

     "No."  Another wave of the wand, and he Levitated her into her chair.  "Miss Stanhope?" he said when she turned to go.  She paused, her hand dancing lightly on the guiding stick of her chair.  "It is within your rights as a student to file a report with the Headmaster about your injury, both how it happened and who was responsible," he said diffidently.  There.  He'd done it.  He'd given her the weapon with which to destroy his career.  

     Rebecca sat in her chair and looked at the Potions Master standing in front of her.  His hands were clasped behind his back, his feet wide apart.  His face was a careful mask.  He reminded her of a Puritan minister, all staid blackness and spartan efficiency.  _Sinners in the hands of an angry God, _she thought nonsensically.

     The proverbial sword dangled precariously over his head, and with the purposeful forward push of her hand, she could send it down upon him.  The question was, did she want to?  If she did, it would only cement his suspicion that she was out to make trouble for him.  If she didn't, there was the risk that his behavior could escalate.

     _Do you really think so?_

Oddly, she didn't.  He was ruthless vindictive, petty, and cruel, but he was far from stupid.  Why would he waste his time and jeopardize his career beating on a pitiful cripple?  He wouldn't; he would be more cunning, more subtle.  

     _Well, if you keel over in a few minutes, your theory will be proven correct, _her subconscious piped up.  _You did let him daub you with that potion._

     Yes, she had.  Nobody knew about it but the two of them.  If she collapsed in the hallway, none would be the wiser.  Still if he were going to poison her, he wouldn't be thick-headed enough to send her to the Headmaster.  He wasn't exuding triumphant malevolence, either.  Rather, she sensed something akin to contrition.  It wasn't remorse; she doubted that he was capable of such a thing.  It was more like self-disgust that he had overstepped a self-imposed boundary he'd sworn never to cross.  So, did she want to?

     _Yes,_ she thought savagely, her hatred for him swelling in her heart like pus in an abscessed tooth.  The galling lust for revenge coated her mouth like ash.

     An image arose in her mind of him squatting beside her.  For an instant, just after he had rolled up her sleeve, she'd seen a litany of emotion cross his face-surprise, concern, and a flash of self-castigation so stark it had made her stomach drop.  The gentle prodding of his fingers as he massage the medicine into her skin.  There had been no malice in his touch, only cool efficiency and calm thoroughness.  He had not tried to hurt her further.  Did she really want to destroy him simply because she could?  

     _This is your first brush with true power.  What will you do with it?_

     The question hung in the air.  "I don't think that will be necessary, sir.  Accidents happen.  I bruise easily, something of which I'm sure you weren't aware."  She swallowed, and the taste of ash was gone.

     He looked at her for a very long moment, gauging her intentions.  "If it should hurt you again, go at once to Madam Pomfrey."

     "Yes, sir."

     He opened the door to the classroom and stood aside.  "In the future, Miss Stanhope, use the lavatory before class.  I will tolerate no more accidents of this nature."

     "Yes, sir."  With a soft motion of her finger on the navigation stick, she was gone.

     Severus Snape closed the door and leaned heavily against it, resting his head against the cool wood.  He took several deep, steadying breaths and then went to his desk, where a pile of third-year essays waited to be marked.  He pulled the stack to him, sat down,  stabbed his quill into the inkwell, and began to work.

     _Infuriating chit,_ he thought uncharitably, trying to decide whether he was angrier at himself for his egregious lack of self-discipline, or at her for her appallingly Gryffindor display of mercy.  There was nothing worse in the world than owing your enemy.

     Soon, the merciless slashing of a sharpened quill on parchment filled the room, and eventually, his mind.   


	8. Sqiuds, Spice, and Things Not at All Nic...

Chapter Eight

     It was just past seven-thirty in the morning, and Severus Snape had just stepped into his trousers when there was a loud, impatient rap upon his door.  Before he could even think to mutter a desultory invitation to sod off, the door banged open, and Minerva McGonagall barged in, immaculately dressed and brimming with fury.  _Three guesses as to what this is about,_ he thought grimly.

     "Really, Minerva, though I realize it has been quite a while since you've had the pleasure of a gentleman, it's bad form to storm in uninvited," he greeted her blandly.

     "I'm in no mood for crass levity this morning, Severus," she retorted briskly.

     "No, indeed."  He moved around her and went to his wardrobe in search of a shirt.

     "You know very well why I'm here," she seethed, pointing a stiff finger at him.  "It's about Stanhope."

     He pulled on his shirt without comment.  "It's really a rather tired subject.  May we discuss this another time?  I slept badly last night, and there are some things I must see to before class," he said dismissively, buttoning up his crisp white shirt.

     "No, it cannot wait," she shouted, and slammed her hands down onto his desk so forcefully that he raised an eyebrow in surprise.

     "That desk has been in my family for three generations; I'll thank you to treat it with care," he spat, irritated at her holier-than-thou presumptuousness.  He whipped his robe of its hangar with a snap.

     "I don't give a damn about your desk or anything else you own for that matter," she snarled.  "What I do give a damn about is the health and psychological welfare of the students, particularly those in my House."  She straightened and stalked to where he stood smoothing his robes before a full-length mirror.  "I heard the most amazing story from Potter and his friends this morning.  Would you like to hear it?"  She stopped and stared at him expectantly, hands fisted on her hips.

     He made no reply, appearing for all the world to be absorbed in the contemplation of his reflection, but his mind was busily turning over this latest revelation.  Of course it would be Potter.  He and his saccharine band of do-gooders couldn't possibly have resisted such an obvious crusade.  Cruel, heartless, ex-Death Eater Professor Snape tormenting the helpless, feeble, gormless cripple.  What a golden opportunity.  It had probably taken them less than two minutes to make it from the Potions classroom to McGonagall's quarters with the glad tidings.  Damn the meddling little snivelers.

     When he showed positively no interest in hearing this riveting saga, McGonagall treated him to it anyway.  "They said," she huffed, eyes blazing, "that Miss Stanhope asked you several times to be allowed to use the lavatory.  You refused.  When she could no longer hold it and urinated all over herself, you publicly humiliated her and forced her to get down on her knees and clean it up."  She stepped back and fixed him with a what-do-you-have-to-say-about-that glare, folding her arms across her chest.

     "She made a mess, and I made her clean it up," he said calmly, turning to face her.

     "She never would have made the mess if you had allowed her to use the lavatory."

     "She had more than enough time to use it before the lesson."

     "Perhaps she didn't realize she needed to go."

     He snorted, striding over to the desk and sorting through an orderly stack of parchment.  "She is crippled, Minerva, not feckless.  She knew very well she needed to go.  She chose not to, and that is beyond my control.  She had to deal with the consequences, unpleasant though they may have been," he murmured, his nose wrinkling at the remembered stink of hot urine.

     "You could have let her go.  What harm would it have done?"

     "I am not indulging those students irresponsible enough to make poor decisions," he snapped.

     "Merlin, Severus, not everything is a grand life test," she exclaimed, her cheeks hectic with exasperation.

     "Isn't it?" he said quietly, and something in his gaze made her back up a pace.  He fondled a piece of worn parchment in his hands.  "People who make poor small decisions often go on to make poor important decisions, and that most assuredly is fatal."

     "Don't be ridiculous.  It was nothing more than a trip to the loo."

     "Whatever it was, I was within my rights as a teacher to refuse her permission," he said staunchly, tossing the paper nonchalantly onto the desk with a light flick of the wrist.

     "Fine," she conceded, looking pained at having to make such an admission.  "But you most certainly overstepped your boundaries by insisting she clean it up without the assistance of magic.  That was unconscionable."

     "You're assuming I had a conscience in the first place," he said drily.  "According to the students-and most of the faculty-Snape and conscience are mutually exclusive terms."

     "Don't play that game with me."  She drew herself up.  "You knew better.  You simply wanted to torment that girl."

     "You're absolutely right, Minerva.  I spend every waking moment obsessing over how to degrade Rebecca Stanhope.  It haunts my dreams and holds sway over my waking thoughts.  I can find no other joy in my life."  He rolled his eyes.  "I disciplined a student; no more and no less."

     "You've never asked any other student to clean up a mess like that," she shot back.  "It's appalling."

     "No other student has ever urinated on my floor," he said matter-of-factly.

     "For Aphrodite's sake, Severus, she's different from the others.  She needs careful handling."  Her voice shook with anger and a note of pleading.  "What if she should get hurt?"

     He thought for a moment of the dark bruise of his hand emblazoned on her shoulder.  _Bit late to be worrying about that.  _He kneaded his hands across his face.  He was tired.  He'd gotten little over six hours of sleep last night, and it had been troubled by uneasy dreams.  In one he had felt Stanhope's frail shoulder snap and grind beneath his squeezing fingers.  He awoke on the crest of her agonized wail.  He'd been up berating himself for his loss of control ever since.  Now McGonagall was here trying to heap salted guilt into his wounded pride.  His own temper, slow to wrath with his colleagues, began to slip.

     "No, Minerva, no she isn't any different from the others.  She is, no matter what your bleeding heart would believe, a student like all the rest.  When she accepted transfer here, she implicitly agreed to abide by the rules of the institution.  She also consented to endure the same risks and foibles faced by the rest, and one of those risks was to fall under my dominion.  Every student here runs the risk of injury, humiliation, or death.  Fate will not be any more merciful to her because she is at a disadvantage.  Why should I be?"

     "Because you can be.  Because she deserves it," she said vehemently.

     "Does she?"  he asked, amused.

     "Yes."

     "Why?"

     "Look at her."

     "Oh, I have.  Every day.  And do you know what I see?" He was speaking so softly now that McGonagall had to lean in to hear him.

     "What?"

     He turned his flat black gaze to her.  "A victim," he said, and his voice was cold and hard.  "Someone to be trampled beneath Voldemort's feet when he and his armies rise up.  She has been coddled and protected for so long that she's forgotten how to fend for herself.  She's helpless, Minerva.  She can't even scrub a floor without falling into an exhausted heap.  Albus did her a disservice by bringing her here, into the middle of the ugly war brewing outside these walls, and you're doing a greater one by treating her with kid gloves.  The world is a hard place, and she needs to learn that fact before Voldemort teaches her most painfully."

     McGonagall was staring at him in disgusted incredulity.  "You think she doesn't know that, Severus?  I think she is bloody well aware of that fact already.  Life has been one indignity after another for her, and I won't add to it," she said, her face chalky with indignant fury.

     "Then the blood is on your hands, not mine."

     She was on her feet and looming over him in a second, her spectacles clattering to the floor with the speed of her ascent.  "How dare you!" she hissed, her knuckles crackling like bones tossed onto a bonfire.  "I have worked all my life to protect the students in this castle.  How can you suggest I would ever do anything to harm one of them?"

     "The road to Hell was paved with good intentions."

     "I suppose if you had your way, you'd have us turn all the students here into numb, ruthless little Death Eaters like you," she said coldly.  Then realization of what she had said flooded her face, and her mouth dropped open.  "Severus, I'm sorr-,"

     But his own temper had slipped its rapidly fraying leash, and he stood up in a single fluid movement.  "At least if they became numb, ruthless Death Eaters, they would learn how to survive.  It's the first thing you learn.  How to survive.  By any means necessary.  Even if it means killing.  If Voldemort and his armies stormed this castle tomorrow, how many students do you honestly think would survive?  A dozen?  A half-dozen?  Even one?  Or would their bones be ground into powder beneath the advancing army's feet?  How many of them would be willing to do what it takes to survive?  Not nearly enough.  There's something to be said for being numb; it makes doing what you have to that much easier.  A conscience just makes things messy."  The velvet whisper of his voice tickled her nose.  He reached down and picked up her glasses, holding them out to her with a wry smirk.

     She snatched them from his hand as though she feared to be scorched by his touch.  "The Headmaster will hear about this," she choked, trembling with outrage.  She jammed the spectacles onto her face with a savage stab and spun away from him.  She left, slamming the door hard enough to rattle it within the frame.

     He stared after her in the silence that followed.  Then he stalked into his dining room to fix himself a cup of tea liberally splashed with Anti-Ache powder.  His head throbbed like a timpani drum.  He jerked his cabinets open, making them shriek on their hinges.  He found his tea and kettle in the cupboard above the stove and set them down with a bang, trying in vain to staunch the flood of anger that made his eyes pulse and his chest cramp.

     His teakettle rattled while he filled it in the sink.  He'd always known McGonagall and the other staff members mistrusted him, and now that mistrust had finally been revealed twice in as many days.  He hadn't been surprised that it was there.  He supposed it was only natural for them to be leery of someone who came from the ranks of those they were trying so very hard to destroy.  He would have been.  What he had been taken aback by, though, was the fact that McGonagall, of all people, had been the first to let that cool, professional mask slip, to let him catch a glimpse of the ugly suspicion in which most of the staff secretly held him.  She, like him, was poker-faced, holding her cards close to the robe and never tipping her hand.

     Dumbledore would be troubled to learn of the growing rift between him and McGonagall.  Their relationship had never been cozy-the natural rivalry between their Houses precluded that-but they had always managed to be stiffly cordial, willing to put up a façade of harmony for the sake of the school and for Dumbledore, who frowned upon such internecine faculty squabbling.  Lately, they had been bickering with alarming asperity, and their already fragile working relationship was damaged beyond repair, at least as far as he was concerned.  No doubt she would attempt an apology later; her distressingly overblown sense of mawkish Gryffindor honor would demand it.  He could give a damn.  He would accept, of course, if only to keep the school running smoothly and to placate Dumbledore.

     Dumbledore.  His Headmaster and superior.  So much more than that.  The man who had saved his life, who had given him a second chance when so few had been willing to give him a first.  The man for whom he was currently risking his life because he had once saved a young man's soul.  Such an odd man he was.  Wise and strong and compassionate to a fault.  There had been times that he could have sworn the old man's compassion would be his downfall, and yet, time and time again, his had turned out to be the right path.  _Have faith in the Light, Severus_, he often said, and he had tried.  But it was hard to believe, to trust in something that had never given you reason to before.  And so he trusted in Dumbledore.  It was what got him through the madness.

     It was hard to say what he felt for Dumbledore, even after all these years.  He loved him, yes, but he hated him, too, especially in the dark and hopeless hours he spent at Voldemort's feet, screaming and writhing and begging for his life, smelling the sour tang of his own excrement in his nostrils.  During those times, hatred blotted out all hope and he cursed his name, longing to reach out his shaking, sweat-slicked hands to snap the brittle bones of his neck.  The injustice of it maddened him.  That he should suffer while Albus was safe in his impregnable ivory tower.  Then it would be over, and he would return to Hogwarts and Albus, and the love he thought surely stamped out forever would return, stronger than before.

     The shrewish howl of the teakettle interrupted his thoughts, and he yanked it from the heat with an impatient jerk.  He turned off the stove and went in search of his teacup and the vial of Anti-Ache he kept hidden for emergencies.  As he rummaged for them in the organized clutter of his kitchen, his mind turned to Stanhope, the strange girl that consumed so much of his time, and to Dumbledore, the man to whom he entrusted his life.   Albus had always known what was best before, but even if he was right about what was to come, he still didn't understand why he had chosen her, of all people.  Even if it came to that, they wouldn't be that bad.  They couldn't.  Lost limbs, blindness, grievous wounds, but not such ravaged wrecks of humanity as Rebecca Stanhope.  It was a mind-boggling impossibility.

     _Is it?  You know better._  He poured his tea without really seeing it.  He had seen things during his tenure as a full-fledged Death Eater that he would never forget, no matter how much Dreamless Sleeping Draught he quaffed or how often Voldemort subjected him to the tortures of the Cruciatus Curse.  Sometimes, he feared his mind would finally break beneath the strain, and those would be the only things he would see, the blasphemies magic could create.  

     Voldemort, in spite of his vanity and greed, was a twisted genius, and at the time he had first joined as a bitter young man with black ideals, the Dark Lord had been experimenting with Transfigurative Magic, melding things that were never meant to be joined.  Most of the time, he used unwary, indigent Muggles as the fodder for his dabblings, but occasionally, the child of someone who opposed him fell victim to his work.  The results were unspeakable, monstrous things that defied all natural laws, shook the tenuous foundations of his faith in the universe.  Most had died shortly after creation, and their carcasses had been burned, but some had survived, proof of Voldemort's madness.  Of his madness come to think of it.  He had assisted in some of the experiments.  He could only hope that, with no one to tend them after Voldemort's fall and the scattering of the remaining Death Eaters, they had died of neglect and starvation.

     Voldemort had also spent much time concocting and testing new spells, curses and hexes designed to maim, cripple, and destroy.  He was fortunate enough to have the services of Agrippina Delerov, the preeminent Russian Transfigurations Master of her day.  She still was, actually.  Agrippina was alive and well and living in Kiev, one of those Death Eaters who escaped punishment using the Imperious Curse defense.  Though her hair had gone from stunning chestnut to silver over the years, she was still as formidable and vicious as ever, and he shuddered silently every time he saw her standing at Voldemort's side during Circle meetings.  

     Some of the hexes she had invented had left the test subjects travesties that made Stanhope seem the paragon of earthly perfection.  Travesties that had survived and been fully, painfully cognizant of what they had become.  Agrippina and Voldemort had laughed while the things that had once been human beings screamed and gibbered with the horrified realization that their arms had contorted in ways unfathomable to any sane mind.  Some screamed without mouths, or indeed, without any heads at all.

     So, yes, it could be that bad.

     He sipped his tea and wandered back to his desk to riffle through the stack of parchments again.  Flowing, neat scripts clashed with untidy scrawls, and in the middle of the mass of excreble drek was Stanhope's homework.  He winced when he saw it.  It hadn't gotten any better.  He pulled it from the stack and examined it more closely.  Well, he took that back.  It was still unreadable, but he could make out more letters than he had on previous assignments, even whole words in some places.  He held it up to the faint light straggling in through the dusty window by his desk to see if he could make out any more.  No.  He squinted at it, willing his eyes to make sense of the garbled script in front of them.

     _What the hell am I doing?_ he thought.  _Wasting my time and eyesight on this shameful mess.  _Disgusted with himself, he threw it onto the desk, sat down, and pulled out his quill to write an uncompromising zero in the top right corner.  She needn't feel bad, though; judging by the cursory glance at the other scrolls, she would not be the only one to receive such marks.  He took another sip of tea, grimaced when he found it tepid, and sat the cup in its saucer with an annoyed clatter.  He thought again of the dark, almost certain possibility of war.

     Albus knew it was coming.  So did he.  The only people too thick to see it were Fudge and his loyal minions in the Ministry.  Even some of the older students here sensed it, smelled it in the air like the earthy, electric scent of an onrushing storm.  Were they ready for it?  Albus was.  He had been a vital part of defeating the Dark wizard Grindewald fifty-four years ago, and he had lost none of his potency.  Harry Potter was-he had to be.  His friends, ready or not, would go with him to the death.  About the others, he could not say.

     Did he mean what he had said about the Death Eaters being better prepared than they were?  To his dismay, he found that he did.  Albus was a great man and a wonderful strategist, but he would never sanction the use of the Unforgivables by the students.  He would take the high road until the last of them fell.  Better, he would say, to be felled with dignity than to survive in dishonor.  Which was all pretty rubbish, of course.  All the dignity and honor and valor in the world wouldn't matter when they were all dead, dying, or enslaved under the Death Eater regime.  There would be no one left to remember those things, those lofty conceits, and the few who did would come to rue them under the stinging bite of slavery's scourge.

     Even if Albus could be swayed, few of the other teachers would agree.  Moody would likely be his sole ally, prone as the old Auror had been to using the Unforgivables himself on reticent Death Eaters.  It would certainly pain him to agree with old prey, though.  Flitwick and Sprout were too mild to entertain such thoughts.  Vector and Sinestra would see the logic of it, but would not act without Albus' approval.  And staid, stuffy McGonagall, who had never even dreamt of using her knowledge of Transfiguration to fashion a suitable substitute for her lack of male companionship, much less for illegal purposes, would rather be drawn and quartered than teach her students the fine art of rearranging the human form or taking life.

     If the teachers, through their stubborn moral rectitude, were reluctant to use the knowledge he knew they possessed, then the students were simply, fatally unprepared.  The Unforgivables were not something they would have been taught.  Decent, respectable wizards didn't do such things.  And because _they_ didn't do such things, they assumed no one else did, either, though the headlines in the _Daily Prophet_ had been telling them the opposite for years.

     Decent people.  He snorted.  Death Eaters were not decent people, a fact which most people didn't truly seem to grasp until they stood face to face with one in their parlors.  They were rich, powerful, sometimes respected, always feared, but never decent.  Their hearts were as black as the robes on their backs.  They would kill and maim and enslave on a whim, and it was a given that they taught their children the use of the Unforgivables as soon as they could grip their wands properly.  Slytherin would be well-prepared.

     Slytherin.  The children caught between the Light and the Dark, pawns in a game too large for their young eyes to see.  It was his job to protect them, and yet he couldn't see how.  Most of them were entrenched in the darkness, weaned on it.  Those not born into it were tempted by the crushing peer pressure to give in to its thrall.  The strong few who resisted would not see adulthood.  Loyalty to the Dark Lord was often stronger than the ties of the flesh.  One, perhaps two, would be lucky enough to find a savior and embrace the Light, but regardless of the side they chose, most of them would not survive to see a brighter day.  They would be mown down by both the darkness and the Light, as traitors and as monsters.  To be in Slytherin was to be damned.

     _Dammit, Severus, stop this maudlin palavering.  _He scowled and ran his fingers through his uncombed hair.  No use lamenting for a future that was not yet come.  Like his past, it was out of his hands.  He picked up his quill, an anchor to reality and all things normal, and took out his fear on the homework parchment in front of him.

     While Severus Snape hid from his pupils and his fears in his quarters, Rebecca sat by the lake.  Though half-awake and stiff, she was enjoying the glow of early morning sunlight as it washed over the landscape and dappled the water in a serene, shimmering haze.  She pinched pieces of the roll she was holding and tossed them into the lake.  She watched in lazy amusement as the giant squid drifted languidly to the surface to capture the scrap in one glistening tentacle before submerging again.

     Feeding the enormous squid was a relaxing way to start a day.  She'd been up since seven, unable to sleep after a grueling night in Professor Snape's lair.  Winky had wanted her to stay in bed, to skip Care of Magical Creatures in favor of much-needed rest, but she had insisted on getting up.  They were grooming the Borgergups today, and she didn't want to leave Seamus alone with Mischief.  It was the least she could do after getting him in trouble, penance of a sort.  So, she had convinced Winky to get her up, dress her, and send her to breakfast, which, at that early hour, had been all but deserted.

     It was nice, sitting here and feeding the lake-dweller.  There was a rythmn to it, a routine-tear, toss, watch, tear, toss…  The smell of the dewed grass and the warm caressing, tendrils of sunlight on her face were revivifying, cleansing her of the fetid, dry-rot stench and bone-throbbing chill of the dungeons.  She was fascinated by the squid, too.  It was such a big, ugly beast, and yet it was beautiful.  It moved through the water with such lithesome grace, its meaty pink tentacles trailing behind it like living streamers.  On land, it was clumsy, helpless, doomed to die, but in the water it had found its niche.  It was regal, sleek, and grand, the lord of its realm.

     The stalwart stone walls of Hogwarts shone in the sunlight, and its proud banners flittered and popped in the teasing breeze blowing from the west.  Had she found her niche here?  She hoped so, hoped with every part of herself, but she felt so out of place.  The staff had made all the reasonable concessions, and most of the students, with the notable exception of Draco Malfoy, left her to her own devices.  She had even made friends in Neville, the twins, and Seamus, but something still didn't fit.

     _You know exactly what the problem is.  Stop beating around the bush._  Her hand tore another strip of bread from the rapidly dwindling roll.  No matter how many changes and concessions they made, they could not change the fact they she was alone.  There was no one else like her in the school, maybe not in the entire continent, and that was a scary feeling.  Professor Moody was close, and she did gain a little comfort when she saw him limping doggedly down the corridor, but it wasn't quite the same.  Not to her.  He'd gotten that way long after he'd proven his worth to those around him.  His injuries had not devalued him in the eyes of his peers.  In fact, they had venerated him, made him something more, made him legend.  He'd gotten them doing something brave, fighting for a cause.  All she had ever done was be born too soon.

     They had a word for people like Professor Moody at D.A.I.M.S.  "New Crips," they were called, a play on the idea of "new rich."  They were treated with kindness, but the reservoir of understanding and unity shared by the congenitally infirm did not extend to them.  If they demanded sympathy as their right, what they got was hostility and abrupt, ruthless excommunication.  What right did people paralyzed for three months have to beg pity from people who had lived their whole lives broken and battered and struggling for each dawn?  None.  That they had once lived among the blessed, the sound, the ignorant, counted against them.  They had to earn their place, suffer as they had suffered, learn to hate, learn to thrive on bitterness and spat prayer before they were accepted into the fold, and even then they were always marked as different.  Their opinions were given less weight than those of the veterans when important matters were discussed.  They were the other masquerading as one of them.

     Still, she almost would have welcomed one of them just to have someone like herself here.  It didn't even have to be a person in a wheelchair.  A blind student, a deaf one, it didn't matter.  As long as there was someone on the same playing field.  It had gotten to the point now where even a temporarily broken limb was cause for secret jubilation.  It meant that someone, for a few minutes anyway, was just as helpless as she was.  Last week in Defense Against the Dark Arts, a Gryffindor boy suffered a fractured arm when he came out on the wrong end of a scuffle with a Slytherin.  She had nearly clapped at the sharp, wet snap of bone, and then instantly regretted it.  She wished him no suffering; she only wished for a companion to help bear the burden of being a pioneer.

     "New Crips."  It was a terrible thing, she knew, not something with which she wholeheartedly agreed, but she had never stopped it, never stood up to protest it.  Because deep in her heart, in the most honest part of herself, she understood it.  Sometimes, she felt it, too.  When some self-absorbed, whining sixteen-year old former beauty pageant queen sat bitching and moaning about the unfairness of life after she had been the one to get drunk and wrap the Audi Daddy bought her around a utility pole, it was hard to conjure up anything but contempt.

     This label was not always leveled fairly.  It was a weapon.  It was cruelty and malice, power for the powerless.  The older students used it to weed out the undesirables.  They separated the chaff from the wheat, so to speak.   She tossed the last bit of bread into the lake.  The squid claimed it with a soft _plip. _She winced as her should gave a dull twinge.  A gift from Professor Snape.  Her body had been a constant ache since she had fallen into his grasp.

     She thought about her strange, irascible Potions Master.  She had never met anyone so hateful, so full of spite.  He was a fortress, an island unto himself.  It was clear that he wanted nothing to do with life and expected very little from it, and she could understand that.  Life was a terrible, ugly, cruel business that took more than it gave and required all of your energy just to keep your head above water.  Snape was treading water as hard as he could, but he looked like he was losing ground, like he was encumbered with a terrible weight and falling prey to the undertow.

     Nights under his watch were strange affairs.  Cold and aloof, he rarely spoke, and when he did, it was in terse monosyllables.  He looked at her only when necessary, and when he wasn't staring her down he was marking parchments.  Sometimes, though, when he thought she wasn't looking, she caught him gazing pensively into the hourglass, as though trying to count the minutes and hours left to his life.  In spite of her dislike for him, concern would still her hand for a moment.  There was no hope in that gaze, none at all.  He was a man waiting for unseen consequences.  What gripped him so?  

     _Guilt.  _Her grandfather spoke with absolute conviction.

     She chuffed.  _You don't mean to tell me he wishes he wasn't such an asshole?  Somehow, I doubt he's weeping in his chambers at the end of the day._

_     No.  I don't think he loses a wink of sleep over the things he does in the classroom.  Not one bit.  But everyone has their own secret, their own burden to carry.  Even you._

She did, at that.  A name slithered into her thoughts like an unexpected enemy.  Judith Pruitt.  _Go away, Judith,_ she thought.  _I'm too tired for this._  Judith's memory brightened with the sun, and after a brief, half-hearted struggle, Rebecca let it take her.

   Judith was twelve when she came to D.A.I.M.S., a thin, mousy girl trying to come to terms with life as a paraplegic.  Her father, drunk as lord and twice as arrogant, had smashed into a bridge abutment at eighty miles an hour.  He had broken his arms and legs and crushed his sternum-injuries from which he eventually recovered.  His daughter was not so lucky.  Pinned in the twisted wreckage of the car and unconscious for fourteen hours, she awoke to find herself with a lifelong companion of metal and wheels.

     The transition was not easy for her.  She cried too much, almost constantly, and in the first weeks and months, she urinated and defecated on herself with alarming frequency.  Unable to accept the loss of feeling in her lower extremities, she also refused to accept the catheter or adult diapers the nurses offered to help combat the problem.  After all, what twelve-year with a single tatter of self-respect would consent to them?  

     The students tried to be understanding at first, especially her long-suffering roommate, who awoke night after night to the pungent reek of urine or the sweet, sickly stench of feces, but as the accidents and weeping fits continued, the goodwill waned.  The nurses stopped offering even disingenuous reassurance after her nocturnal mishaps, and the students began to avoid her.  They began crossing the hall when they saw her pushing herself towards them.  Soon, she was eating alone at the school table, cast off to the side as the cleaner, saner students huddled together and wrinkled their noses at the faint, persistent odor of old urine.

     Things truly began their downward spiral for Judith on the night she tried to approach Deidre Clapham in the Common Lounge.  Deidre was the self-appointed matriarch of the girls at D.A.I.M.S, seventeen and beautiful in spite of the Muscular Dystrophy that sapped her strength.  Vain as the queen peacock, she spent hours primping and preening before the mirror, combing her hair with a tortoiseshell comb she strapped around her stronger hand with Velcro.  A cloud of rose oil perfume followed her wherever she went.  She liked things clean and neat and pretty.  She did not like Judith Pruitt.

     Rebecca was tucked away in the corner of the Common Lounge, her nose buried in a book, when it happened.  The smell was overpowering, a swampy, gassy, rotten fruit smell that made her shut the book with a slam and cover her nose.  Jerold Hawkins, known as Hawk to the students, froze in the process of setting up a game of solitaire.  His deafness did nothing to shield him from the stupefying reek, and he clapped both hands over his nose, looking like a grotesque parody of a Hollywood scream queen.  Every head turned to look for the source.

     She thought she was hallucinating when she first saw Judith.  She prayed that she was, but her nose could not lie.  Numb horror was what she felt, numb horror and a revulsion so deep it made her veins contract.  Judith had had an accident.  That was the smell.  She could only surmise that she was sick, that the flu had gripped her insides and turned them inside out.  Her white slacks were a deepening brown, and they clung to her in wet, gelid hanks.  Waste dribbled from the pantlegs and onto the floor, leaving a murky brown trail.

     "Help me," she quavered, tears streaming down her face, and a thick runner of snot hanging from the end of her nose.  She shifted in her chair, and there was an awful, bubbling squelch.  Someone-Rebecca couldn't see who because she was transfixed by the calamity in front of her-laughed, a shrill, hysterical sound.  Silence.  Complete silence.

     No one moved.  They couldn't, at least Rebecca knew she couldn't.  It was as if the wreck that was Judith Pruitt had become a Medusa and turned them all into stone.  The hand of the clock lurched forward another pace, and Judith sat in her filth, weeping, animal sounds of shame and bewilderment slipping past her lips.  They blinked, but that was all they did.  No one stepped forward to help her, no one called out for the nurse.  They just stared.

     To Judith Pruitt, it must have seemed like the walls were closing in, like she was the star exhibit in God's cosmic carnival, but Rebecca, even now, couldn't fault herself or the others for their reactions.  She had known what they were feeling, what they were thinking.  _Doesn't she know better?  _The thought was palpable.  It was etched on each amazed face.  _Doesn't she know better?_  

     They all did.  Not one of them had been spared the embarrassment of losing control of bowel or bladder.  New students in particular were prone to upset stomachs or irregular bladders while they adjusted to the bland cardboard that the overweight pensioners on the kitchen staff called food.  Others were caught unawares in class.  You could see them hobbling or rolling down the hallway as fast as they could, desperate to make the safe haven of the bathroom before disaster struck.  If it were too late, they still moved as quickly as possible so no one else would see them.  No matter what, they always took care of it themselves, or if they couldn't, discreetly summoned a house elf via the intercom in each room.  They never went to each other for help, not with that.  They may have been crippled, blind, deaf, and incarcerated, but they still had dignity.

     "Help me," Judith wailed again, and this time, she reached out a hand to Deidre Clapham, who sat in petrified horror, the Divination book she had been reading perilously close to sliding off her knees and onto the floor.

     Rebecca was so disgusted that she recoiled even though she was twenty paces out of harm's way.  She was not the only one.  The room pulled back en masse.  Hattie Turkle, a second year with Tourette's Syndrome, wrung her hands and shrieked, "GODDAMN FUCKERFUCKER SHIIIT!"  Quite apropos, considering the situation.

     "Right on, Hattie," muttered Jackson Decklan, a black, double-amputee who made his way through life on a pair of pneumatic artificial legs with rectangular feet.  Hattie dissolved into helpless giggles.  Rebecca fought to keep from laughing and screaming at the same time.

     Deidre Clapham did what most people would have when faced with an excrement-smeared hand hovering less than three inches from her face.  Her lips drew back from her teeth in a snarl, and she looked from the hand to Judith's blotched, snot-slicked face.  Then her own hand drew back, and she slapped her across the face.  "Get away from me, you freak!" she screamed, and pulled her chair as far away from Judith as she could.

     A lot happened after that.  Freddie Kington, an epileptic who suffered at least four petit mal seizures a week and one grand mal seizure a month, promptly vomited down the front of his shirt and collapsed in a fit.  Hattie Turkle went into a flood of swearing, most of it dealing with the things a drunken cattle rancher could do with a heifer.  She was jumping up and down.  Jackson went clumping down the hall on his titanium legs, bellowing for a nurse to come help Freddie before he swallowed his tongue.  No one paid any mind to Judith Pruitt.

     She had watched the unfolding chaos with dim dismay, wondering if a covert government agency had secretly slipped LSD into their dinners and was now watching the results from the cover of false walls.  Everything was happening in slow motion.  Even the laughter sounded warped somehow, like an audio tape dragging along the dusty, bent wheels of an abused tape recorder.  She looked to her left and saw Jerold grinning crazily at her, stringers of vomit hanging from his lips.  His playing cards were a total loss.  She opened her mouth to ask him what was so funny and realized that she was laughing.  Cackling.  Howling.  She bent double and let the tears stream down her face.

     When the pandemonium died down, Judith Pruitt was a pariah, a leper in a colony of one.  The students shunned her, and the school administrators and staff had no more mercy.  The morning after the fracas in the Common Lounge, the halls rang with frustrated howls and tearful begging.  Whether she wanted them or not, Judith got her diapers.  No one complained.  Not the staff, who had grown tired of cleaning up her messes.  Not the students, who could once again travel the halls and breathe fresh air.  Certainly not her parents.  Her father, stricken with guilt over what he had done, now lived in the bottle that had brought them to this in the first place.  Her mother, well, a crippled daughter might have been good for the sympathy vote, but was a definite liability on the middle-class social circuit.  For all intents and purposes, she was alone.

     The teasing was relentless.  Accidents were henceforth christened "Judiths," and the social elite delighted in tormenting her, pointing at her and laughing as they passed.  Deidre Clapham was the ringleader, naturally.  She rolled through the halls with her gaggle of sycophants and hangers-on like an untouchable queen, her wheelchair a royal carriage instead of eternal shackles.  Every morning at breakfast, she would trumpet, "No accidents today, Judith," and every evening the shrill call of, "Any accidents today, Judith?" would travel across the Common Lounge.  Watches and hourglasses could be set by them. 

      Judith never fought back, never stood up for herself.  She withdrew into her own world, and with each submission, the attacks grew fiercer, crueler, more savage.  Deidre and the other girls sensed the weakness, the pathetic vulnerability, and they were drawn to it like sharks to the taint of blood.  Tighter and tighter they circled, and those who were not sharks waited and watched.

     Rebecca had been one of the latter.  She had not harmed, but neither had she hindered.  She observed from over the tops of Arithmancy books and beneath half-closed lids.  She saw Judith quail and wither and never said a word.  It wasn't her business.  Over the years, she told herself that she had been too busy coping with the interminable suffering of her best friend to interfere, but truthfully, she hadn't stepped in because she hadn't cared.  She had her own life to live and her own burdens to bear.

     Judith survived that year and the next, but it was clear that the effort of keeping her head down and her mouth shut was exacting a cruel price.  She grew fat, corpulent.  The chair creaked and groaned beneath her weight.  She ate constantly.  Rebecca watched her surreptitiously in the Dining Hall as she shoveled forkful after forkful of food into her mouth.  Often, she tried to cadge the desserts from other people's plates.  All the sugar and grease destroyed her complexion; pimples erupted on her cheeks and the bridge of her fleshy nose.  Celeste, Deidre's successor in the line of self-appointed queens, in one of her most creatively cruel moments, had pointed at her and laughed, saying,  "Nurse!  Nurse!  I think Judith has typhoid!  You better come check!"  The Hall had howled with laughter.

     If Judith had hoped that the layer of fat and the mask of acne would insulate her from the cruel jibes, she was mistaken.  It only gave her tormentors more incentive.  Now, instead of one incident, they had a whole litany of sins from which to choose.  She was fat.  She was ugly.  Most shamefully of all, she was weak.  Even the silent non-combatants knew it and reviled her for it.  As the months passed, the feeling of watchful waiting increased.  The air grew thick with anticipation, and the more sensitive of the watchers turned their heads away.  Everyone sensed that the sharks were about to move in for the kill.

     It happened the following fall.  Beyond all expectation, Judith had survived the summer.  This disturbed no one more than Celeste, who seemed to take her continued existence as a personal insult.  She was downright vicious, seeking her out for ridicule.  She deliberately spilled things on her, gossiped loudly about her offensive body odor(about that she was right; Judith smelled like overripe cheese), and generally did everything in her power to crush what little was left of her spirit.  The sands of the hourglass grew painfully few.

     The Common Lounge was painfully quiet that night.  Everyone was on edge.  Hattie Turkle, always the first to sense disquiet and confusion, had been fidgeting and screaming profanities all night.  Even a dose of Ritalin hadn't managed to calm her.  Jerold was trying to play solitaire, but his fingers were trembling so badly that he kept knocking them onto the floor.  The nervous flutter of turning pages was the only thing to disturb the quiet.  The watchers were waiting.

     Celeste had been especially vengeful that day, sniping and bitching at Judith with unusual verve.  By dinner, she had reduced her to spineless, shivering sobs, snot dripping down her nose into her mashed potatoes.  Everyone else had studied the fascinating spatial patterns in their food arrangements until, at long last, Judith had fled from the room.  With her had gone the tension and unease, following her like her own twisted pheromones, and the room had broken into to relieved chatter almost at once.  Celeste had flashed everyone a my-aren't-I-grand-smile, her rule unchallenged.  After that, she had been almost pleasant.

     Around seven-thirty, though, the tension was back, seeping into their muscles like cold mist drifting beneath a door.  Some of the more spastic students had been having attacks all night; their grunts and barks of discomfort floated from their rooms.  The muscles in Rebecca's shoulders had been jumping and twanging, and a heavy mallet was thudding against the small of her back.  

     Hattie Turkle put down her book, cleared her throat, and shouted, "Cocksucker!"  Then she calmly picked up her book and resumed reading.

     No one had seen Judith in several hours.  Not that they had been looking terribly hard.  The last person to see her had been her roommate, Janice.  According to her, Judith had asked her personal house elf, Bobs, to help her take a shower.  The house elf had been only too happy to oblige; bathing was not something she did regularly.  That had been forty-five minutes ago.  The house elf had returned to the attendant dormitory twenty minutes ago, but Judith was nowhere to be seen.

     At eight twenty-two, Janice retired for the night, bidding the few uneasy inhabitants of the Common Lounge goodnight.  The sound of her cane tapping down the hall as she felt her way to her room faded.  The page-turning continued.  Rebecca was surprised to feel sweat trickling down her forehead.  For reasons she could not understand, her heart was thudding in her chest and her palms were slick.

     _What's happening? _she thought dizzily, and her stomach gave a nervous lurch.  The sound of an inhaler firing off caught her attention.  A wiry seventh-year was sitting in an easy chair with his head between his knees, trying to draw deep, even breath.  _He feels it.  We all feel it._  

     At eight thirty-one, Janice staggered up the hall, and Rebecca saw immediately that something was horribly wrong.  She wasn't walking with the usual cautious, delicate grace of the blind.  She was stumbling, scissoring, the cane pointed impotently to the wall.  Her shades were off, and her eyes were bugged and terror-glazed.  

     "Janice?" Rebecca asked.  Her chest joined her back and shoulders in their warning flares of pain.

     At the sound of her voice, Janice's head snapped in her direction.  Her nostrils flared as though she scented danger on the wind.  "Rebecca?"  The cane slipped noiselessly from her hand, and she gave a strangled sob.  She raised her hands before her face.  Hands that glistened dark red in the fluorescent light.

     "Wha-,"  That was as far as she got before Janice threw back her head and howled into the darkness behind her eyes.

     The next few hours were complete pandemonium.  Janice's shriek summoned the night nurse, a gargantuan Samoan woman with a face like a shovel.  At the sight of Janice's bloody, dripping hands, she paled and sprinted toward the room she shared with Judith.  Rebecca had watched her thundering thighs and giggling buttocks with hysterical intensity.  _Like receding clouds,_ she thought dreamily.  The clouds disappeared around the corner, and a moment later the nurse reappeared, spittle drying on her chin.  Then she fainted, toppling like a hewn redwood.  The students were promptly ushered to their rooms.

     It didn't take long for word to spread, though.  Like prison, D.A.I.M.S. had an underground information network second to none.  The nurses and administration knew about it, of course, but they were helpless to stop it.  It was a river that ran its own course.  By dawn the next morning, it had reached every tributary, and rippling beneath the morose silence that prevailed over the next week, the tempestuous eddies of speculation were at full strength.

     Judith Pruitt had taken a shower, gotten out, and been placed into bed by Bobs.  Shortly after his departure, she had broken a handmirror she kept on the bedside table and used one of the shards to slit her own throat.  The mess had been appalling.  Some of the gorier rumors held that the nurse had slipped in the cooling, congealing puddles of blood, but Rebecca knew this to be untrue.  The nurse had been impeccably clean when she staggered out of the room-dazed, but clean.  

     Eventually, a version closest to the truth had emerged.  Judith had slit her throat with a shard of handmirror.  Then Janice, coming in to retire for the night, had arrived.  She called out for Judith, but got no answer.  She had heard the steady plip plip of dripping moisture, though.  Soft and furtive.  Thinking Judith had left the tap slightly open, she had gone into the bathroom to turn it off.  The faucet knob had been unyielding beneath her hand.  Then the smell hit her ultra-sensitive nose.  Hot, coppery blood.  She had groped her way over to her roommate's bed, hoping that maybe she'd only fallen and cut herself but knowing by the overpowering, salty stink that it was something so much worse.  Then her hand had settled in a warm, viscous pool.  She fled, choking on her own breath.

     The grief counselors came, psychiatrists bent on prying open the secrets of their minds.  They got nothing.  The stone walls came up; the code of silence was unbreakable.  The watchers dealt with things in their own way, and the well-meaning interlopers did not understand.  They wanted her and the rest to "express their feelings," to "verbalize."  They wanted them to stop the business of their lives and expose the intricate mechanism that let them thrive in that self-contained, incestuous world.

     They couldn't.  They wouldn't.  If some of them took that dangerous luxury, they might not get moving again.  They might uncover hidden feelings they'd buried deep within themselves, stumble across losses they'd hoped to leave behind.  Regret and uncertainty would mire them down, and they would torture themselves on the rack of self-pity instead of struggle through another day.  Those strong enough would leave them behind, abandon them out of necessity.  They would regret it, but it would not stop them.  Above all, they were survivors.

     They spent a lot of time with her, reasoning, she guessed, that since she had been the first to see bloody Janice, she must be the most affected.  The sight of dripping scarlet gloves must have warped her impressionable mind.  It was laughable.  After watching her best friend slowly succumb to the patient malice of leukemia, after years of nightmares and carefully hidden, seething anger, Janice's bloody hands were of no account.  They were just another drop in an already-full bucket.

     Still, they insisted.  They wheedled and prodded.  They asked leading questions.  They showed her pictures, inkblots.  As if seeing a caterpillar or a dog emerge from the shapeless blob would truly tell them what she held in her mind and heart.  She smiled at their self-important presumptuousness, and they took this as a positive sign, mistaking the upward curve of her lips for "making an emotional connection."  They scribbled their findings on their bloodless forms.  They dedicated entire pages to the fact that she was polite or that she acknowledged being frightened by Janice's scream.  They wrote, typed, and filed thousands of pages.  They might as well have been blank, for all they really said.

     What would they have said, she wondered as she wiped crumbs from her robes, if she had granted them their wish?  If she had revealed to them the truth about that place and the society it bred between its walls?  Would they have understood?  Likely not.  Only they understood, the watchers.  They were clannish, a primitive tribe bent on surviving, no matter how many members they had to sacrifice to do it.  Judith had been a sacrifice.

     There was no grief.  There was bewilderment and horror, but no sadness.  Judith had simply been too weak to make it.  She had neither the skill nor the desire to fight for herself.  It was a simple as that.  Cased closed.  Clean up the body and carry on.  They had neither time nor energy to waste on someone who had not given a damn about herself, not if they gave a damn about themselves, and most of them did.

     On a personal level, Rebecca had been disgusted by Judith's suicide.  Not because it had represented the tragic, pointless loss of human life, but because it had been such a cowardly act.  She had watched her friend suffer for nearly a year, and for every last second of that time, he had fought tooth and nail for his life.  Even stoned on near-lethal doses of morphine, he had struggled; the last week of his life, his heartrate would plummet only to rally again.  Judith had chosen to die, voluntarily squandered what had been torn from between her friend's tenacious fingers.  She wasn't going to waste undeserved sympathy on a gutless waste of divine love.  Not when she had so little of it left.

     After Judith's dry-eyed memorial service, the administration decreed that house elves, previously auxiliary attendants summoned on demand, would now be constant companions.  Tiny beds were moved into the students' rooms, and the tiny wardens accompanied them everywhere.  Rebecca didn't mind.  She was quite fond of the cheerful little creatures.  Dinks was the name of her companion, and his passive, content nature provided a welcome contrast to the stoic, militaristic demeanor of the nurses.  After a time, they became de facto confidantes, privy to information the bumbling school psychiatrists would have killed for.

     There were drawbacks, of course.  The elves even accompanied them to the showers.  If showers were all they were doing in there, it wouldn't have mattered, but it wasn't. The showers were a haven, a place of privacy, ideal for sexual exploration.  Or at least they had been.  With the goggling, solicitous eyes of a house elf peeking around the shower curtain, it was all but impossible to conjure the necessary ambience for successful gratification.  Their already anemic sex lives all but disappeared, and the ever-present bitterness that skirled through the air like noxious dust motes deepened.  On top of all else, Judith had managed to stifle their sexuality as well.

     Thinking ill of the dead.  Add that to her list of sins.  God, she was such a bitch.  The guilt she pretended not to feel welled up, and she closed her eyes against it.  Damn Judith.  It wasn't like she had been the only to leave her to her fate.  She wondered if this particular specter of the past haunted the others.  Did Celeste awake in the night with Judith's sad face looming out of the dark?  Did Janice suddenly feel the slick sheen of blood beneath her palm?  Did Deidre, in the months before she suffocated beneath her own body weight, hear Judith's plaintive wail?  She found herself wishing desperately for more bread with which to busy her hands.

     "Go away," she said aloud.

     "Didn't mean t' disturb ya," said a rumbling voice from behind her,

     She twisted around to see Hagrid standing behind her, an uncertain smile on his face.

     "Oh…hello, Hagrid.  I certainly didn't mean you.  Just talking to myself."  She flashed him a smile.

     He lumbered over beside her.  "Surprised to see you up so early.  Most students like their shuteye."

     "Sometimes I can't sleep.  Decided to come feed the squid."

     Hagrid beamed.  "He's beautiful, isn' 'e."

     She nodded.  "He looks so happy in the water.  Doesn't have a care in the world, I guess."  

     "Gen'l, too.  Would you like to touch him?"

     "Could I?  I mean, he wouldn't pull me in?"

     "Accourse not.  He likes bread and pumpkin pasties, not young lasses like yerself," Hagrid boomed jovially.

     She looked up at Hagrid, who was grinning down at her through his big, bushy beard, then back at the placid surface of the lake.  There was now way to tell exactly how deep the lake was, but it was at least deeper than the top of her head.  She could drown in there.  Then again, Hagrid would be there to fish her out.  A Hogwarts professor wasn't going to let her sink to the bottom on their watch.  It would be fun.  It certainly was a treat.  Nothing like this had ever been offered to her at D.A.I.M.S.  Their idea of derring-do was an extra cookie at supper.  That alone was incentive enough to ignore the possible danger.

     "OK."

     "All right, then.  Let's get these shoes off."  He squatted down and tugged gently at her sneakers.

     "Might want to loosen the Velcro first," she said mildly.

     "Oh."  He pulled back on the Velcro with his massive fingers, and her shoe slipped off easily, engulfed in the massive palm of his hand.  He put it down in the wet grass and pulled off the other one.  He did this daintily, as though he feared he might break her.  "Pull up the hem of yer robe, Rebecca.  Wouldn't want to get it wet."

     She did as she was told, and a moment later, she was nestled in his mammoth arms.  She was sure they made an odd sight, a Herculean Jack Sprat and his miniscule wife.  There was a slosh-water being displaced by a pair of steamshovel feet-and then he was calf-deep in the murky water.

     "Here 'e comes," he crowed, and she turned her head to look.

     The squid scudded toward them, tentacles undulating softly behind it.  It came leisurely, sedately.  It was taking its time, and that was fine by her.  She was happy where she was, almost blissful.  Hagrid's strong arms were supporting her, and the musty, dusty smell of his patch-riddled moleskin coat was reassuring.  The sun was warm on her scalp, and D.AI.M.S. was a million miles away.  Right here was just fine.

     The water rippled, and Hagrid shifted a bit as the squid nudged his leg.  "We have a visitor, Rebecca."

     She looked down and saw the great yellow eye of the squid appraising her from the depths, its black iris like a sunspot.  It was easily as big as a fist.  She smiled at it, and it watched her sedately.  

     _You're a wise old thing, aren't you, _she thought for no reason at all.  The squid reached out and curled a lazy tentacle around Hagrid's leg.

     "Ready?" he asked.

     She nodded, and he squatted down, his haunches grazing the surface of the water.  The squid waited patiently.  She winced when her fingers plunged into the water.  It was cold, like liquid ice.

     "All right there?"

     "Yes, just a bit colder than I expected."

     He grunted companionably and shifted to allow her to reach farther.  "Come December, it'll be frozen solid.  Pretty, but no' pleasant to land on."

     She ran her fingers along the smooth skin of the squid, amazed at its suppleness.  It was like wet velvet.  The squid hovered obediently beneath her hand, seeming to enjoy the contact.  She trailed her curious fingers down his body and brushed her fingertips against the pale pink flesh of a tentacle.  It was surprisingly warm.  Suddenly, it twined limply around her wrist, and she started at the light pressure of its puckers against her skin.

     "He's fantastic."  She giggled, feeling lighter than she had in days.

     Hagrid held her there for a few more minutes before the chill of the water drove him out.  "Sorry, Rebecca.  If I'd stayed a minut' longer, I'd be a bloomin' ice sculpture.  Can't be good for your hand, either."  He tucked her into her chair.

     "It's all right," she said, though she was disappointed.  She hadn't wanted it to end.  "Thanks, Hagrid, that was fun."

     His face broke into a sunny smile.  "You're welcome."  He pulled a pocketwatch from his pocket and checked it.  "Heavens!  They'll be here any minute!  I've got t' run an' change my trousers.  Can't teach class wi' a frozen bum."  He saluted cheerily, and headed for his hut and dry clothes.

     She smiled after him a moment.  _Would he smile at you like that if they knew what you've done, what you let happen?  _The ghost of Judith was back again.  _Will any of them?_  The smile faded, replaced by a grim line.

     _Screw you, Judith.  You chose to die._  There was no reason they had to know what happened.  That was a different life, light years away from where she was now.  She could make a fresh start here, and she meant to.  Judith had no place here.

     _You thought I didn't have a place there, either_, Judith pointed out.

     A flash of scarlet.  Gryffindor scarves.  Her classmates were coming across the field.  Someone raised their arm in greeting.  She squinted.  Seamus.  _Shut up, Judith._

She squared her shoulders and did what she had always done.  She joined her classmates and got on with her life.


	9. Initiation and Interrogation

Chapter Nine

Care of Magical Creatures was an interesting affair to say the least.  There weren't any other words to describe the experience of grooming a Borgergup as far as Rebecca was concerned.  By the time it was over, there would be plenty-hell, controlled pandemonium, the best exercise since Quidditch-but without the blessing of foresight, interesting was all she had.  

     Only Hagrid seemed unaware of the folly of such a thing.  He announced his plan with gusto, beaming around at them as though he had just announced that they would all be receiving top marks for the rest of the term.  He was stone deaf to the groans of consternation as he called each pair up to claim their Borgergup from the crate by his feet.  In fact, he hummed and clapped each student on the shoulder as they passed.

     "Be fun, this will," he chortled.  "They love a good bath.  We'll be filing their toenails, too."

     No one had the heart to point out that the Borgergups hadn't seemed to like any of their previous baths.  They got one at the end of every session to rid them of the perpetual streams and clots of vomit with which they coated themselves, and they fought it every time.  Viciously.  They scratched, scrabbling at exposed arms with dagger-tipped feet.  They bit, sinking needle-sharp teeth into careless fingertips.  When all else failed, they projectile-vomited into the face of their enemy and scurried to the temporary shelter of the rocks dotted around the paddock.  Only a great deal of sweat, swearing, and straining corralled them again.  Each day saw a troupe of students trekking dispiritedly to Madam Pomfrey's for first aid, dirt smeared on their faces like the mark of war.  The next battle in the endless campaign was about to begin.

     "Are you ready?" she asked Seamus, speaking out of one side of her mouth so Hagrid wouldn't hear.

     His only response was an incredulous snort that said more than words ever could have.  She found herself agreeing wholeheartedly.  She loved Hagrid dearly, but she was regretting ever having made Mischief's acquaintance.  She had enough bumps, bruises, aches, and pains without a smattering of burning claw marks and assorted teeth marks beneath her nail beds.  Snape alone had introduced her to a cornucopia of new discomforts.

     The thought of Snape brought to mind the memory of the livid black bruise that currently festooned her shoulder.  Her fingers crept to her shoulder to steal over the secret mark beneath her robes.  Though it hadn't pained her since Professor Snape had applied his mystery ointment, it was quite visible.  Winky had been beside herself when she saw it.  Rebecca's explanation that a student had given it to her while trying to keep himself from falling had been absolutely useless.  The little elf had seen right through it, and only her frantic pleas that she was more afraid of the Hospital Wing than of the dull black blemish on her pallid shoulder had convinced her not to drag her charge to Madam Pomfrey at once.

     A faint scowl creased her forehead.  She didn't want to think about it.  It was too unpleasant; she still felt the phantom grip of his hand, and after battling Judith this morning, she didn't have the energy to relive it just yet.  At the mention of her name, Judith's forlorn, determined memory tried to well up again, but the presence of others had deprived her of much of her potency, and after a brief struggle, she retreated to await her next opportunity at resurrection.

     "Here y'are, Rebecca," Hagrid greeted her, and he plopped the warm ball of Borgergup onto her lap.  He clapped her on the back, predictably striking her directly in the center of the bruise.  Though there was no pain, she instinctively flinched, anticipating what logic told her must exist.  Hagrid grew serious.  "A'right, Rebecca?"

     "Oh, erm, yes.  It's just, I fell out of bed this morning.  Shouldn't have tried to get up without Winky."  She mustered what she hoped was a convincing smile.

     "No you shouldn't," he agreed emphatically.  "Very foolish of you."

     "Yes, sir," she murmured.  Being brought to task by the usually placid Hagrid was a new experience, and judging by the nonplussed expressions on the faces of her classmates, she wasn't in much company.  Still, it wasn't all that bad.  Not when compared to Snape, anyway.

     He gave her a long, searching look, as though trying to think of something else to say.  Then he nodded.  "A'right.  But if you start feeling worse, you see Madam Pomfrey at once.  You understand?"

     "Yes, sir."

     "Of you go, then."

     She returned to her place, grateful to have escaped from beneath his kindly, querying gaze.  It was maddening, the well-meaning sympathy.  It drove her to distraction.  She knew the teachers were only trying to be helpful, but all they really succeeded in doing was setting her further apart from the rest, cutting her off from the vital protection and support of the others as quickly and efficiently as a pack of jackals singling out a lame zebra for the kill.  They might as well hang a neon sign that screamed _Vulnerable!  Different!_ over her head.

     _Go see Madam Pomfrey if it gets worse._  It was almost a religious benediction, a common phrase in the daily medical liturgy that was her life.  Even Snape had said it.  It was as though Pomfrey, with her white smock and tri-cornered hat, was the high priestess of health, the all-knowing seer who could remedy every ill with a wave of her wand.  Nothing was further from the truth, and the teachers, burdened as they were with infinitely more life experience than her, should have known it.

     It was funny, she mused, the way people put so much faith in doctors.  In nurses.  In medicine.  Such blind faith.  Maybe it was the white uniforms.  Maybe that was it.  Maybe they saw the gleaming white smocks and pristine lab coats and mistook them for miracle workers, for holy emissaries of the Divine Being, capable of healing all wounds and righting all wrongs.  Maybe that's what they all wanted-needed-to see, to believe.  Maybe the truth was too horrible.

     She knew the truth, had seen it.  Soldiers and cripples all over the world had.  Doctors and nurses knew nothing.  What they did was the same as what Sybil Trelawney, with all her incense and warped crystal balls did.  What Professors Vector and Sinestra did.  They guessed.  They made it look good; of course they did.  Got to give the people what they paid for.  They poked and prodded and theorized, and they hid their lack of knowledge behind the ritualistic clack and beep of machines and the comforting, mystic drone of medispeak.

     The uninitiated, the occasional interloper into the sacred and treacherously clean otherworld of medicine, was fooled, remaining blithely ignorant of what lay behind the sterile plastic curtain.  And it was better for them that way.  The rational, just inhabitants of the world of walking upright would have been driven mad by the grim reality.

     Doctors were helpless, really.  Sometimes, they guessed incorrectly, and even when they guessed right, the choice was out of their hands.  They could pray and they could hope, they could jab with needles and inoculate with their strange potions, but in the end all they could do was watch.  Nothing, not even their laboratory-born magic, could win every round.  Usually they lost more than they gained.  They considered it a good day if they broke even.

     It was never pretty when they lost, not for them, and especially not for their patient.  No one ever went quietly.  Self-preservation was strong, even in the bodies of those for whom life held no more joy.  They fought until the last, hands clawing and scrabbling wildly atop the thin, bone-white coverlet.  They drew ragged breath after ragged breath, craving the air even as it stank of their own rot.  Even when consciousness left them, they fought, the primordial center of their brain refusing to surrender to the inevitable.  They kept breathing and pissing long after the bewildered shamans had packed away their magic stones and dried goat's testicles and headed for the cleaner, safer territory of their offices, leaving them to the priest and bonecarrier.  They outlived hope, reason, and while they held on, people given everything threw it all away.

     No, she had no faith in the clean, white myth.  It was a happy childhood dream, like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, and like those dulcet dreams of infancy, it too eventually shattered under the weight of cold reality.  For her, the religion of medicine was little more than the ramshackle remnants of a defiled church, and Madam Pomfrey, Hogwarts angel-in-residence, little more than a false prophet.  

     "We should get going."  Seamus interrupted her in his soft Irish brogue.

     She blinked.  "Oh.  Sorry.  Lost in my own thoughts there for a minute."  Truthfully, she had no idea how long she had been sitting there, and that disturbed her.  Obviously it hadn't been too long, as Seamus didn't seem all that concerned.  Still, she'd have to keep a tighter rein on her thoughts from now on.

     They carried Mischief to what had become their habitual spot against the largest boulder.  He sat contentedly in her lap, black tongue dribbling thick runners of saliva onto her knees.  He was happy enough now, but as soon as he saw that water-stained wooden tub, he would be all business, struggling with all his might to escape.  She scratched him beneath his furry, matted chin, and he gave an appreciative belch.

     "That's disgusting," she chided him, waving a hand in front of her nose.  He panted up at her.  To Seamus, she said, "Have you served your detention yet?"

     "Yeah.  Professor McGonagall had me polishing and waxing the desks in the Transfigurations classroom.  Got a Howler from my mam, too.  You?"

     She shrugged.  "I serve detention with Professor Snape every night, so it really doesn't matter.  Haven't got a Howler yet, but it probably takes awhile, coming from the States and all."

     She neglected to mention that she probably wouldn't be getting one.  Her parents weren't all that interested in her life.  In fact, they were probably relieved to have her so far away.  Her mother in particular made no secret that she considered her a burden, a liability, an unwanted penance.  Her father was never home enough to notice her absence.  He spent his life sifting through the drek of people's septic tanks and avoiding her mother's venom.

     "Well, we'd better get started," he said.  They had been procrastinating about bathing Mischief.  Everyone else had already started, and the air was filled with the scent of soap and the sounds of grunting students and mortified Borgergups.  As they watched, a ball of suds with legs streaked past, trailing bubbles in his wake.  His owner, red-faced and sweating stumbled past, nearly tripping on his soaking robes.  On her lap, Mischief squawked in wary dismay.

     "You better hurry, Seamus.  I think he's getting suspicious."

     "Right."

     He ambled over to the few remaining tubs and picked them over, rejecting one with a rotten bottom and tossing aside another before choosing the sturdiest of the bunch.  Through it all, Mischief's glittering eyes tracked his progress.  She could feel the tension in the little creature's body.  She almost felt sorry for him.  To him, a bath must have been like the dozens of useless medical procedures to which she had been subjected.  Frightening, inhumane, and incomprehensible.  She stroked the top of his head in reassurance.  She could feel the blood pulsing beneath his fur and flesh.  He was a high-tension wire ready to spring.  __

     _I understand, little buddy.  Got no choice in the matter, though.  You understand, don't you?_  Of course he didn't, anymore than she had when the white-masked doctors had assailed her with their probes, syringes, and machines.  She had fought like a caged animal then.  She would have run if she could.  If Mischief were smart, he'd run at the first opportunity.

     Seamus returned, gripping the tub carefully and walking slowly so he didn't spill any of the water over the side.  Then he set the tub down with a clunk and sloshed a freshet onto the ground anyway.  He wiped his hands on his robes, and then held them out for Mischief.  "Ready?"

     It happened so quickly that she was left sitting in bug-eyed disbelief.  One moment Mischief was wriggling and struggling in her outstretched hands, and the next he was streaking across the grass, long black tongue lolling comically behind him like a dripping black banner.  _Fast little sucker, _she thought stupidly as she watched him scamper toward the safety of the Forbidden Forest.

     "Bugger!" shouted Seamus, and he took off in hot pursuit of the runaway Mischief.

     His cry galvanized her, and she followed behind him, though she wasn't sure exactly what she could do to help.  Moving just seemed better somehow.  At least she was doing _something.  _She manipulated her joystick in hard, jerky arcs, trying to keep up with Seamus and avoid gawking onlookers at the same time.  The wheelchair growled and burred as she made a sharp turn.  She squinted to keep sight of Seamus' scarf fluttering like a beacon in the wind.

     She watched him run as the chair chugged behind him, lurching as it reached top speed.  She loved watching people run.  It was divine, running.  If it weren't for the rank sweat and the flush it produced, she would have thought it effortless.  Feet always seemed to float across the dirt and grass, remembering, perhaps, older, headier days of Hermes and his winged sandals.  They flew, even if it was only a few centimeters off the ground.  She envied them that freedom.

     They never seemed to notice they had it, and that was so strange to her, because she saw it in every graceful, loping stride.  It was in the way they stretched forth their faces to meet the sun, to touch God as they passed.  It was in they way the breeze cupped their faces and tickled their hair, drying the sweat on their skin.  They never noticed it, though, never understood the gift they had.  Instead they built elevators and escalators and conveyor belts and complained about having to walk or climb.  They complained about the fact that for the briefest of moments, they could grasp heaven between their fingers.  They shunned their Divine gift, and she found that very sad.

     Seamus used his Divine gift to pivot Mischief away from the treeline and toward the paddock and castle grounds.  "Oi, Rebecca, cut him off!" he gasped, lunging for a tuft of the creature's hair and missing by two feet.

     She pulled the stick hard left, throwing herself to the right to balance the weight.  The chair responded with a whine, but it was too late.  The Borgergup on the lam was like lightning, his hairy form a brown blur as it raced past her front wheel.  She could have sworn it shot her a smug look as it kicked a rolling cloud of dust into her face.  She coughed and spluttered and redoubled her efforts, leaning forward and trailing a powdery hand along the trampled blades of grass.

     "Dammit," Seamus bellowed, doing his level best to keep up with the determined Mischief.

     She understood how he felt, but she couldn't deny that she was having a marvelous time.  She was outside in the grass and sunshine doing something that required physical effort.  She was using muscles that hadn't seen so much activity since…well, never, and she was using them in a cooperative effort rather than in a vain attempt at avoiding Professor Snape's unforgiving recriminations.  She was _living_, not just alive, and she never wanted it to end.

     _You might not think so if you were in Seamus'_ _shoes_.  Well, no.  She probably wouldn't.  Sitting in a magic-propelled wheelchair was a far cry from sprinting in the early fall morning.  It needed a hell of a lot more energy, for one thing.  As charming as she found running, it had clearly lost its appeal for Seamus.  He was flagging badly, huffing and wheezing.  The distance between him and the feisty Borgergup was growing.

     Mischief knew it, too.  He almost grinned as he skittered across the well-manicured lawns, wet, jagged canines jutting happily from his mouth.  His furry feet flew, razor claws digging up divots and chunks of dirt.  The race was on, and freedom was the prize.  He intended to make the most of it.  She watched as he carved a tri-clawed path from the paddock to the castle.  He was having a jolly time.  In fact, he was toying with Seamus now, pausing just long enough to give the boy a miserly glimmer of hope before darting out of range again.

     Even though she knew he'd have to be caught if they wanted to receive marks, she couldn't help but feel a faint tug of admiration for him.  He was bucking the system, seizing the day.  Carpe Diem, baby.  He was free and conscious of the fact.  The wind was in his fur, and the earth was beneath his feet, evidence of his fleeting liberty.  He was reveling in it in the most fundamental sense, understanding the experience in a way Seamus, bound by his desire to capture, and tired as hell, could not.  She silently cheered him on, smiling guiltily as her intellect called treachery.

     The Borgergup stood invitingly in a patch of sun, and Seamus took the bait.  He dove for it all.  Mischief sidestepped him, the world's smallest bullfighter dodging the red-eyed bull.  Seamus met the empty ground with a bone-rattling thud and earned a mouthful of uprooted grass and earth for his troubles.

     "I'll get you, you dodgy little sod!" Seamus raged, swiping his forearm across his chin and scrambling to his feet to resume the chase.

     Maybe he would, but not before Mischief was ready.  The hairy dervish veered toward her, and, caught by surprise, she stuck out a retaining hand ten seconds too late.  A glob of sticky drool flecked her hand as he sped by.  She turned her chair just in time to see him weave through the minefield of tubs, where snickering students sat with their rapidly pruning hands immersed in sudsy water.  Seamus staggered after him.

     She took off in pursuit, the magnets used to pivot the wheels clicking crazily as she slalomed recklessly through the tubs.  Seamus was a few steps ahead, and she slowed to avoid ramming into his heels.  His robes flapped in her face, and she pulled away from the sweaty fabric.  The other students shifted to let them pass, yelping as her rear wheels skimmed buttocks or toes. 

     _This is getting ridiculous._  She pulled out her wand.  Maybe a well-placed Petrificus Totalus would do the trick.  She raised her wand and took aim, but just them Seamus cut into the line of fire.  Damn.  She would have to be careful.  It would be easier to just petrify them both, but she doubted he would appreciate it very much, especially if it came from behind.  So she waited.  Her wand jittered as she skidded through a narrow opening between tubs.

     "Seamus, move," she called.  He looked back, saw her wand, and moved to the right.

     Her first shot fell just short, leaving a scorch mark inches from Mischief's bobbing rump.  He looked around in surprise.  _Well, that was most unsportsmanlike,_ his wide black eyes said, and he put on a burst of speed.

     "Oh, shit," they said in unison.

     His agility was maddening.  Each time she thought she had him dead to rights, he swerved or zigzagged at the last instant.  The evidence of his prowess was all over the grass.  A dozen smoking scorch marks and counting.  Hagrid was certainly going to have his work cut out for him when this was over.  Or was it Filch?  She wasn't quite sure under whose jurisdiction the lawns fell.

     The thought of Filch scowling and muttering as he repaired the smoldering black divots in the emerald sea of rolling grass struck her as hilarious, and she burst out laughing, her high-pitched guffaw startling Seamus, who skidded to a halt.

     "What?  What is it?" he panted.  "Have I split my robes?"  He turned his head and pulled the rear of his robes toward his hips to find the source of her amusement.

     "No…Filch…lawn," she gasped, pointing a wobbling finger at the scorch marks.

     Thinking the surly caretaker was on his way to throttle him for trampling the immaculate lawns, Seamus froze, trying to look in every direction at once.  "Filch?  Where?"

     "No, no.  Filch…oh…gasket," she wheezed.  She was laughing so hard now that she dropped her hand to her knee to keep from toppling headlong from her chair.  The hand holding her wand dropped to her side. 

     "You've gone barking mad, woman," he told her.  Then he suddenly remembered that he was supposed to be running down a freedom-starved Borgergup and took off again.

     She trailed along behind him, hiccoughing laughter.  Then a new thought occurred to her.  If Filch ever figured out that she was the one responsible for giving the lawn a bad case of liver spots, he'd hang her from the Whomping Willow by her toes, joyfully and with more verve than he had shown in years, maybe decades.  He was already angry that he had to escort her to detention each night.  He shuffled along ahead of her, muttering darkly about unrepentant miscreants and reminiscing about the good old days when detention actually discouraged pupils from their own stupidity.  If he had the opportunity to punish her himself, he'd probably make a festival of it, bringing out the thumbscrews and toasting almonds over a bonfire while she swung from the tree.  He might even sing and dance an Irish jig.

     The image of craggy, gnarled Filch capering around a roaring fire like an opiate-soused hedonist proved too much, and she yodeled laughter, her hand cramping around the joystick.  Laughing while conducting a high-speed chase was a worse idea than laughing while belching, she soon learned.  The chair swerved erratically, and she sat up just in time to see Neville Longbottom leap out of its oncoming path.  She tried to stop, but mirth still held her in its grip, and she could only snort helplessly as she ploughed into the washtub.  She ground to a halt amid a soggy puddle of gray soapsuds and waterlogged planks.

     Double your pleasure, double your fun.  Freed from his wooden prison, Neville's Borgergup wasted no time in joining its renegade companion in the bid for escape.  With a happy bark, it streaked toward the nirvana of liberty.

     "Sorry, Neville," she said, trying to sound contrite and failing horribly as another snort of laughter escaped her.

     "It never ends," he moaned, and jogged after his fleeing Borgergup.

     She rejoined the chase, sputtering laughter.  It was clear that she wasn't going to capture either of the determined escapees, but she couldn't leave her friends to fend for themselves.  This was her mess, after all.  She put her wand away, knowing it was useless.  There were too many targets on the field now, and the risk of accident was too high.  Ahead of her, the two boys trotted disconsolately, Seamus moving at a staggering clip.  The Borgergups were clearly in the lead.

     A collective wail arose from behind them, and they turned to look.  Inspired by the boldness of their brothers, the remaining Borgergups had made a break for it.  They scaled the sides of their tubs, hitting the ground with a wet squelch.  Those unlucky enough to be caught by their alert handlers, nipped and scratched at detaining fingers, drawing yelps of surprise and pain.  The terrain was filled with fleeing white puffs of desperation.

     It was like the charge of the Light Brigade as her fellow students rumbled across the field after their pets.  Scarves fluttered like the banners of an advancing army as they surged forward, laughing and shouting.  There was no malice in their pursuit.  It was joyous, unconcerned.  It was a game.  Group tag.  Catch-as-catch-can.  They jostled, grasping for fugitives at random, calling out as they were thwarted by the feral cunning and sheer determination of their small adversaries.  The lawns had become a living, breathing chessboard.  Strategies formed and collapsed in an instant.  It was a game without rules.

     Rebecca joined the happy throng, weaving among them like a butterfly with broken wings.  She soaked in the sound of their happy chatter as they ebbed and flowed around her.  They were vibrant and glorious.  They even smelled alive, earthy and green.  Their pungent sweat was ambrosia.  They radiated heat, covered candles of secret flame.  It enveloped her like a blanket.

     They swooped and wheeled across the grounds, a flock of raucous phoenixes, a herd of frolicking stallions.  No, a tribe.  A tribe.  Yes, that felt right.  They were a tribe, a traveling clan of gypsies exulting in the wonder of life, corporeal jubilation as they danced across the earth like the red and yellow tail of a comet passing before the face of the sun.  

     She ran with them, soaring in spite of her chains.  And when Seamus smiled at her from where he sat recovering himself, she felt the subtle click in her soul.  This was her initiation.  They were no longer _a_ tribe; they were _her tribe._  Whether they accepted her or not, she chose them.  With a silent oath, she bound her fate to theirs.  Whatever happened, whatever it cost, she belonged to Hogwarts.

     While Rebecca was casting her lot with the students swarming over the lawns, Professor Snape was presiding over a class of bungling first-years.  He paced the room, black eyes ever watchful for signs of imminent disaster-a smoking cauldron, a scorched potion.  His ears twitched, awaiting the claxon of shattering glass or the sizzle of melting copper.  Familiar sounds after four years with Neville Longbottom.  His nostrils flared imperceptibly, searching for the scent of fire or the stink of too much of some ingredient or other.  There would be no explosions on his watch.  He moved with sinuous grace, a panther prowling the boundaries of his territory.

     Though he presented nothing less than perfect stoicism to the inepts nervously going about the business of making a mess of things, his mind was troubled.  In spite of the generous dollop of Anti-Ache Powder with which he had laced his morning tea, a headache thudded dully behind his temples.  He knew it was only going to get worse as the day wore on, and if Minerva held true to her threat-and he knew she would-he could expect a visit from Albus later on this evening.  If not that, then a conversation at the High Table while McGonagall watched imperiously.  His headache throbbed murderously at the thought.  He fought the urge to knead his temples.  Merlin, he would be quaffing Anti-Ache like Albus devoured lemon drops.  He clenched his teeth behind closed lips and willed the throbbing to go away.  It didn't, but after a moment it eased to a manageable level.  He let his jaw relax.

     Damn that girl.  Damn her.  Anyone with two good eyes and a nominally functional brain cell in their head could see that she shouldn't be here.  She couldn't keep up, and when the war came, in all likelihood she would be one of the first casualties.  Yet, she was just tenacious and bothersome enough to cause him problems.  Mulish little twit.

     _What problems?_

_     This headache, for one.  _He squinted at another bright jab of pain in his temple.

     _She certainly didn't tell you to stay up all night, _pointed out his conscience drily.  Contrary to what McGonagall and the others believed, he did have one, though he would never have admitted it to anyone.

_     She was most certainly the cause of it, _he protested irritably.

     _Why?  Because she saved your job?_

     _I'd rather not think about it._

_     Can't accept mercy from a Gryffindor?_

_     That has nothing to do with it._

     But of course it did.  The thought that a Gryffindor, one of those smug, self-righteous, perfect ambassadors of all things virtuous, had saved his job and preserved his position as a spy for Dumbledore turned his stomach.  They were always lording in their glorious past achievements, parading them about like priceless treasures.  He hadn't been the least bit surprised when Harry Potter had been Sorted into Gryffindor.  The thought had entered his mind before the boy had even mounted the steps to the Sorting stool.  _There goes a Gryffindor._  When the Sorting Hat had confirmed his suspicions, it had been another shining jewel in the House's already bestudded crown and a slap in the face to Slytherin, whose only renown came as being the House to spawn the all-powerful Dark Lord bested by a knight in nappies.  Sickening, really.

     He was not a man who bore debt easily.  He loathed it.  His obligation to Albus he wore uneasily, like ill-fitting clothes.  To owe Stanhope was unbearable.  Stanhope, with her unreadable eyes and galling intractability.  Stanhope and her determination to participate, to prove him wrong.  Her refusal to break under his will, to bow to his dominance in the one place it had never been questioned.  Her quiet bullishness frustrated him to no end, frustrated and frightened him.  He'd never seen anything like it before.

     _And she's a blasted Gryffindor._  It would have been slightly less wounding to his pride had she been Hufflepuff.  Another blow for McGonagall in the House rivalry.

     _Stanhope doesn't know anything about the history between the Houses._

     Thank God for that.  That meant there would be no superior sidelong glances, no preening in the corridors as she surreptitiously flouted the fact that a mighty Gryffindor had graced a lowly Slytherin with her tender mercy.

     _We've been that route before._

He scowled.  James Potter.  _We most certainly will not be discussing THAT._

     Unfortunately, his mind was not to be deterred.  It trotted out every unpleasant memory of those bygone days.  Potter and his band of hangers-on sneering at him from the corners of their mouths, laughing at him with the slant of their eyes.  Even in his youth, he had been a sallow, cautious, uncommunicative boy, and by comparison, Potter and his cronies had been the golden children, a fact of which they had been acutely aware.  Most of them were not overtly malicious; only that bastard Black had ever deliberately antagonized him.  They were more subtle in their cruelty, some would have said unknowing.  They tormented him by virtue of their perfection, reminding him with their poise, aplomb, and prowess with the fairer sex of all he had yet to achieve, and though he said nothing, he hated them.

     Then had come the fateful night at the Whomping Willow.  Sirius Black and his damn prank.  It had nearly gotten him killed.  Miraculously, Potter had regained a modicum of intelligence at the last moment and pulled him back from the slavering, snapping jaws of the werewolf that, in saner hours, bore the name of Remus Lupin.  In that moment, in that single motion, James Potter had bought for himself and bequeathed to his as yet unborn son his undying hatred.

     It wasn't a breach of trust that had scored him to the core.  There had never been any trust to breach.  It was something much simpler.  In the last numb, adrenaline-soaked instant before Potter had pulled him from the bloody, eager jaws of the werewolf, Snape had urinated, the hot liquid dribbling down his legs as terror choked him.  Potter had seen.  For the briefest instant after it was over, his eyes had flitted to the dripping lap of his robes.  He never said a word, but he had seen, and that was enough.  Dignity was all he had ever had, and Potter had stolen even that.

     He balled his hand into a fist, furious at the memories he told himself he had buried long ago.  _I will not waste any more time on the things that lie in times past, _he thought savagely.

     _Now history is repeating itself, and you can't stand it._  _You owe a Gryffindor.  Again._

He stalked around the room, snapping at a student who had the misfortune of choosing that moment to whisper to her seatmate.  His head was throbbing now, all traces of Anti-Ache wiped away.  _That isn't the point, and you know it._

     _Oh, what is, then?_

He forced himself to slow his pace.  Yes, owing a Gryffindor was terrible and owing Stanhope was worse, but that wasn't what had kept him up all night.  As his mind had so kindly pointed out, he was no stranger to the burden of debt.  No, what had plagued his sleep and caused him to pace the floor until after midnight was the egregious lack of control he had displayed in dealing with Miss Stanhope outside the Headmaster's office.

     Control.  It had always been his hallmark.  He had learned it as a young boy, and it had served him well in his days as a Death Eater.  It had allowed him to stand beside Lucius Malfoy and watch as Muggle women and children were raped and strangled, still as a stone while his insides writhed in revulsion.  It had prevented him from thrashing the arrogant Potter child to within an inch of his life every time he opened his sainted mouth.  It helped him preserve the veneer of cool approval when he looked into the face of Draco Malfoy, even when the boy's sense of entitlement filled him with the urge to backhand him across the room.  That legendary control had failed him with her, something he had sworn never to let happen.

     So quick it had been.  He had seen her rolling along the corridor, one skeletal hand wrapped around that odd guiding stick, and he was seized by an overpowering need to confront her, to let her know that he was aware of what she was trying to do.  He had never intended to touch her at all.  Then he had seen her face, that thin sliver of sculpted obstinacy.  She had shown no fear of him, no discomfort.  Only that same practiced nothingness, that bland, taunting neutrality.  The wall around her had been all but tangible; he almost could have sworn that he _saw _it.  He'd wanted to break it.  The only thing he'd managed to do was nearly break her shoulder.  The flicker of fear he had heard in her voice wasn't satisfying; it had come at too steep a price.

     He rubbed his hand across his forearm.  It still tingled intermittently with the sharp jut of her shoulder.  It felt alien to him, traitorous.  It had acted of its own volition.  He hadn't realized he was squeezing her until her wavering voice had pleaded for him to let her go.  Her voice had sliced through his righteous anger like a clarioning thunderclap, and when he looked down again, he saw his hand settled on her shoulder like a treacherous white spider.  He had jerked away and fled, hiding his reeling confusion behind the façade of sneering disdain.

     He wondered what she was, what she really was.  He resented her, the ease with which she deflected him, sealed him out.  It was as though he did not exist, like he was merely a specter flitting inconsequentially through a realm over which she alone presided.  Her indifference needled him worse than the seething hatred directed at him by the rest of the student body.  It told him that in her eyes he was beneath her contempt; he was nothing.  He hadn't seen that look since Azkaban.

     That was a path down which he was most assuredly not going.  He was almost thankful when a small, timid voice cut into his thoughts.

     "Excuse me…Professor Snape?"  Low, strangled.  One step above petrifaction.

     A bitter smile twisted his mouth momentarily before the mask of stoicism slipped back into place.  He whirled noiselessly around, his cloak swirling around his ankles.  "Yes?"  He scanned the shadowy room for the source of the voice.

     Shuffling, the dusty shifting of shadows, and then, a tiny girl stepped from behind a cauldron.  "Erm, sir, I think there might be a problem with my potion."  

     He searched his mind for her name.  Lei Hyung.  Her Thai parents were living in London, working as ambassadors at the Thai consulate there.  Quiet, unremarkably inept, and terrified of him beyond all reason.  He swept to her workstation, smirking as she cringed.  Her fear was almost amusing.  He wondered what she would think, what they all would think, had they known the lurking monster in their midst was actually trying to protect them. He doubted any of them would believe it.

     "A problem with my potion" turned out to be an unmitigated disaster.  His nose registered this even before he laid eyes on the brown slime inside the cauldron.  It stung with the acrid reek of burnt rosemary.  He sighed at the mess.  The potion, which should have been a mild yellow and the consistency of potato soup, was a goopy, viscous, brackish brown, and it sucked the ladle into its depths and held it there like gelid plaster.  He suspected he could hold it in his hands if he wished, though it would likely cling to him like tar and perhaps burn the pale flesh of his fingers to the bone.  He let the ladle drop.

     "A problem, did you say, Miss Hyung?" he asked tartly, one eyebrow raised.  "I would hardly call this infantile, inexcusable, unidentifiable mess, this insult to my craft, a problem.  You see, a problem denotes something that has the possibility of being fixed.  This…"  He lifted up the ladle, which resisted him mightily.  "This is irredeemable.  There is no excuse for it.  The lowest Muggle could do better.  You have surpassed my lowest expectations."

     He loomed over her, his shadow falling over her like divine judgment.  "Clean it up.  Don't bother trying again.  From the looks of this, you'd only be wasting more of my valuable time.  I expect a six-foot parchment on the history and correct preparation of the Pepper-Up Potion on my desk by morning.  When you are finished putting everything away, do us all a favor and get out.  I've had enough of your incompetence for one day," he snapped.

     He knew he was being too harsh, but he didn't care.  His head was pounding, and his stomach twisted at the thought of the discussion he would be having with the Headmaster at dinner.  He was in absolutely no mood to tolerate such glaring stupidity.  Normally, he would have assigned detention as well, but those had become the sole province of Stanhope.  He supposed he could have held other students there with her, but it didn't seem appropriate.  Detention was more than just his way of making Stanhope miserable, of pushing until she broke; it was his chance to study her, to find the hidden entrance into the impregnable fortress of her mind.  It was better that they were alone, free of interference from some sniveling first year.

     Lei Hyung's lips began to tremble.  Her brown, almond eyes welled with tears, and her chest began to hitch.  All the classic signs of a bout of hysterics.  He had seen it all a thousand times.  It bored him.  He felt no pity.  The only student ever to resist such nauseating shows of weakness was Stanhope, and he found himself wishing for her now.  _Stop whinging!_ he wanted to shout.  _If a helpless cripple can retain her dignity, why in Merlin's name can't you?_  He said nothing, betrayed nothing in his rigid stance and dead face, but the contempt he felt for the whimpering child blubbering in front of him deepened.  He turned away from her and stalked to the classroom door.  

     "If you are going to simper and wail like a fluttering premenstrual, please leave my classroom at once," he snarled, wrenching it open with a brutal twist of the knob.  

     Morbid satisfaction washed over him at her expression of shock.  Apparently the thought that a male teacher, especially one so obviously dried up and decrepit, would know anything of the finer points of the female anatomy had never entered her mind.  She gaped at him, scrubbing the back of her arm over her wet, red face.  Then she shut her mouth with a snap and left the room on unsteady, hesitant legs, sparing him a hateful sidelong glance as she went.  He looked after her for a moment as she shambled down the corridor, the sound of her watery sniffles receding as she retreated to the sheltering bosom of her Common Room.  It was a scene that would have elicited sympathy from most, but he felt nothing, nothing at all.  He slammed the door without a second thought.

     He resumed his silent patrol around the room.  The room, unearthly quiet during his tirade, slowly filled with the sounds of pointless industry.  He watched them from behind lowered lids, studying their earnest, bovine faces.  Vapid, ignorant little fools, the lot.  Sometimes he wondered why he was wasting his time with them, trying to mold decent human beings out of empty shells.  As far as he could see, it was an unwinnable battle.

     _Then why did you agree to become a teacher?_

Because Albus had asked him to, and he would have hurled himself in front of a Death Curse for the old man.  After everything he had done for him, he simply couldn't refuse.  It wasn't all bad; he got to make potions for a living and earn a comfortable salary in the process.  Had he tried to strike out on his own, a reformed Death Eater setting up a shoppe in the drabbest corner of Knockturn Alley, he wouldn't have lasted a month.  Angry mobs of vengeful innocents would have shown up in the night to pillory him and burn his home to the ground.  Not that he wouldn't have deserved it.  So Hogwarts it was, a safe harbor under Dumbledore's beneficent gaze.  And…

     And once he had begun his penance as professor and shepherd to the idiot masses, he had discovered something startling.  He liked it.  It was not the students that he liked; he found nothing interesting about any of them.  It was not the tedium of marking scream-inducing parchments.  It was the dark thrill of power the position gave him.

     Power.  The ultimate aphrodisiac.  The most addictive drug ever conceived.  Nothing he could brew in his cauldron could hope to match it.  It was the thing for which he had joined Voldemort in the first place as a bitter young man, and he had found it here in the unlikeliest of places.  It was pure power, too.  What could be more powerful than holding someone's mind, some would say their very essence, in your hands?  Why, you could make them anything you wished.  If you were so inclined, you could destroy them.

     He never had, though he had been sorely tempted.  McGonagall might dispute that.  She would say that he was well on his way to crushing Neville Longbottom.  It wasn't true, of course.  It was hardly his fault that the boy had the mental fortitude of a shucked oyster.  He was weak because he chose to be, and he, Snape, wasn't about to change his demeanor to accommodate him.

     If Albus ever became aware of his musings on this particular subject, he would doubtless be dimly alarmed.  This was not the sort of notion a lover of the Light should be holding.  Those on the side of Good and Right should never crave power, and if they held it, they should never enjoy it.  Bollocks.  Power was neutral; it was the people who corrupted it.

     Take Albus, for example.  He had been Headmaster here for a very long time.  Nearly thirty years.  Yet he seemed in no particular hurry to surrender the position to McGonagall or anyone else.  In spite of all the problems inherent to the title, he was quite comfortable in it.  Indeed, he had wasted little time in trying to regain it when Lucius Malfoy had succeeded it getting him suspended for a time.  He claimed-and Snape believed him; Albus was too good a man to be disbelieved-that he had been in such a hurry to retake his place at the apex of the Hogwarts hierarchy solely out of concern for the Muggleborns, but Snape had seen something other than worry for others in those sparkling blue eyes.  No matter what Albus said, he enjoyed his coveted status as Headmaster of Hogwarts and the prestige such power awarded.  Whether he chose to admit it or not, the lust for power had infected him, too.

     A sloshing sizzle tore him from his disturbing musings.  He spun around to see that a careless student had knocked over a boiling cauldron, sending the scalding contents across the stone floor.  Luckily, no one had been within splashing distance.  The culprit was now standing white-faced over the mess.

     "I'm sorry, Pro-,"

     "Carelessness in this class can be fatal," he hissed.  The headache, which had retreated during his musings, reappeared with a vengeance.  This was going to be a very long day.

     _What else could possibly go wrong?_

_     It could be worse.  Be grateful Longbottom has no younger siblings._

If that news ever found its way to his ears, he would promptly leap from the top of Serpens Tower.  There were some tortures even his iron constitution couldn't endure.  He set his teeth when he saw that the repentant student was making no move to clean up the mess.

     _Remember, Severus, this is your penance._

     And what a terrible penance it was.  He swallowed the knot of anger in his throat and calmly deducted sixty points.  "Clean it up," he snapped, and sought the temporary refuge of his desk.

     He was still in a murderous mood when Stanhope made her regular appearance at eight o'clock sharp.  "Come," he told the soft rapping at his door.

     He felt her enter rather than saw her.  There was the momentary displacement of air as the door opened and then closed behind her.  Then came the whirr of her chair as she passed his desk.  After two and a half weeks the routine was well-established.  She understood what was expected of her and did not bother with pleasantries or silly questions.  He heard her fumbling with the pointer beneath the blackboard.

     "Stanhope."

     He felt the atmosphere of the room tense; her hand had no doubt frozen on the pointer.  "Yes, sir?"  Polite.  Mildly confused.

     "Come here."

     The click of the guiding magnets, the soft whirr as she approached.  Click.  She was in front of him now.  "Yes, sir?"

     He looked up from the research scroll on the proper preparation of the Living Death Draught.  She was sitting directly across from him, her free hand curled possessively around her cauldron.  The other rested on her guidance stick.  He noted with miserly approval that she had not bothered to bring the pointer stick with her, knowing full well that he would take it from anyway.  She was a quick learner.  Her face showed neither curiosity nor fear.  It was a blank mask.

     "Let me see your arm."

     There was no need to ask which one he meant.  She held it out obediently.  He felt like a criminal returning to the scene of the crime as he rolled up her sleeve, but he had to see it again, to be sure it was truly there.  He wanted to make certain it was healing, fading.  Maybe when it was gone it would take the gnawing guilt and self-reproach with it.

     It was still there, dark and accusatory against her pale skin.  He gently probed the circumference with his fingers, waiting to see if she would flinch.  Her face remained impassive, and she did not pull away from his touch.

     "Has there been any pain?"

     "No, sir.  Not since you applied the ointment.  Thank you."

     He looked up sharply at that.  He had received a handful of thank yous in his lifetime, not one of them from a student.  He narrowed his eyes.

     "Are you being impertinent?" he snapped.

     Guarded blue eyes looked back at him.  "No, sir."

     He gave it a final prod.  "Are you certain there is no pain?"

     For the first time since their initial confrontation, her eyes lost that vague distance.  She was there, really there.  The barrier was gone.  "Yes, sir, I'm positive."  No anger…reassurance?

     He hid his confusion by pretending to examine her arm further.  Aside from the livid mark his anger put there, the skin was unmarred.  It was nearly translucent in the unsteady torchlight, and beneath it he could see the spidery network of her tiny veins.  The bones of her misaligned wrist jutted painfully against the thin flesh that covered them.  Her hand dangled bonelessly, and at the end of it her fingers twitched daintily, her nerves standing by for the next order.  It was fascinating and repulsive at the same time, and he wondered what it must feel like to live inside such a body.

     He couldn't ask her such a thing, of course, and so he said, "That will be all, Miss Stanhope.  Your arm is hardly worthy of a museum exhibit.  Get to work."

     Her arm dropped, and he saw her retreat behind the walls.  Her eyes grew cold and distant, and her jaw stiffened.  "Yes, sir."  She pivoted away from him and moved toward the blackboard again.

     For his part, he returned his attention to the dissertation he was reading, and soon he heard the sound of vials clinking in her cauldron.  She was getting remarkably efficient at that; it was a rare occasion now that she didn't collect all her things in under two minutes.  _Clink._  An indrawn breath.  She may have gotten faster, but it was still a difficult process for her.  _Clink.  Clink.  _Almost done now.

     A last clink, and then the sound of her chair crossing the room to her desk.  She was a creature of habit; she always chose the same desk she sat in during the regular class time-first seat on the first row.  _Clunk._  That would be the sound of her cauldron being set in place.  Silence spun out between them.  Expectant.  She was waiting.

     His hand reached out to set the hourglass.  He never looked up from the parchment.  "Begin."

     Immediately her knife began its rhythmic song.  

     When he was sure that she was absorbed in her work, he chanced a glance at her.  She was hunched over her jackal meat, her brow furrowed in fierce concentration.  Her technique had not improved.  She still held the knife too awkwardly, and her strokes were still too large, but there was improvement in her methodology.  She was more deliberate in her cuts, more precise in where she chose to make them.  The desperation to simply cut for its own sake was gone.

     There was something different about her tonight.  She was decisive in her movements.  She seemed tranquil, comfortable.  It was as though a great burden had been shifted from her shoulders, a decision made after much deliberation.  In spite of the little mistakes she made in her work, she toiled with furious determination.  In sixteen nights, her resolve to create a potion he thought out of her reach had never wavered.

     _It's a pity that such raw stubbornness has nothing behind it, _he mused as he watched her grapple with the stopper on her rosehip vial.

     _How do you know if there's anything behind it or not?  You can't read her homework scrolls._

     What was it the Headmaster asked him?  _Given a normal body, would she be able to complete the coursework like everyone else?  _There was only one way to find out.  He opened the topmost drawer of his desk and pulled out the stack of graded parchments.  He shuffled through them until he found hers.  Her ugly, scraggling script stung his eyes.  He squinted disdainfully at it.

     "Miss Stanhope."

     She raised her head, knife tip poised over the dwindling piece of jackal meat.  "Yes, sir?"  Cautious.  This night was not turning out as they usually did.

     "Explain the properties of Blast-Ended Skrewt carapace."

     Surprise flashed across her face.

     _Good.  She's not totally impervious, after all.  _"Quickly."  

     Her brow knitted as she brought to mind all she knew of Blast-Ended Skrewt carapace.  "Blast-Ended Skrewts are the result of crossbreeding between a manticore and a Fire Crab.  As such, their carapace retains all the medicinal properties of both species, though some are weakened because of the hybrid genetics.  For example, Fire Crab shell is essential in the brewing of the Calos Internus Potion, a potion used in the treatment of frostbite.  Skrewt carapace would serve as well, though it would not be as effective since the poison found in manticore skin would preclude its use in amounts sufficient for noticeable relief."

     "Correct."

     A small, satisfied smile crept across her face.

     "Don't look so pleased, Miss Stanhope.  Any fool can get lucky once," he said disagreeably.  "Name its other uses."

     "Because manticore flesh is highly toxic, Skrewt carapace is a popular ingredient in several poisons and acids.  Retaining most of the potency of pure manticore flesh, it is preferred because one can handle it without risk of tactile ingestion.  As little as one-one hundredth of a milliliter can be fatal.  It is the principle ingredient of the Living Death Draught.  More accidental deaths have occurred as a result of improper preparation or administration.  In fact, a special license is required to brew this potion, and fewer than twelve wizards are known to carry it."

     "Correct," said one of those twelve.

     He continued to quiz her, varying the level of questions from the most basic to ones he knew she could not answer.  She did her best to answer each one.  She missed all the ones he had anticipated, though she was surprisingly close on more than a few; it was clear she was using logic to fill in the gaps in her knowledge.  She also missed a few had had not foreseen, but here again, she was closer to the answers than most.  Throughout the question and answer session, she never stopped working on her potion.  She started over again three times.

    By the time he ran out of questions, he was awed and disgusted.  He had underestimated her intelligence by a fair mark.  She was undeniably intelligent, particularly adept in the areas of non-linear logic and abstract thought.  She was able to think on a level many others were not.  Unfortunately, her penchant for thinking in the abstract and extrapolating based on given facts meant that she often missed the obvious implications.  She was blinded to the flames by the smoke, as it were.

     It made him sick.  It was a cruel irony of Fate that such a fine mind was wasted on a helpless wreck while strong, able wizards walked around with withered, impotent minds.  It wasn't right.  Why give her such a mind?  She'd never be able to put it to good use.

     "You are in possession of an extraordinarily keen intellect, Miss Stanhope," he said after a brief silence broken only by the sound of mortar striking pestle as she ground her dung beetle exoskeleton into powder.

     "Thank you, Professor."  She sounded pleased.

     "Too bad you will never be able to put it to any good use."

     The hurt on her face was so plain that it startled him.  Her eyes widened, and her hand trembled.  Her pallid, bony cheeks reddened, and her jaw stiffened.  The left side indented; she was biting her cheek.  He could literally hear the doors slamming and the locks turning as she sealed herself off from the careless hurt he had inflicted.  The glow of wounded pride in her eyes guttered and died, and the blankness returned.  She was gone again.

     She dropped her head to her work.  "Yes, sir."  Her voice was dull, uninterested.

     He watched her for a few more minutes as she doggedly stirred her potion.  "Why?  Why do you try so hard?  What do you have to prove?"

     "Nothing, sir.  Then in a barely audible voice, "Nothing but everything."

     The rest of the night passed in silence.                            


	10. Shifting Loyalties

Chapter Ten

     The conversation he had been expecting at dinner the night before actually took place at breakfast the following morning.  He saw it coming.  Dumbledore was looking at him in that irritatingly smug manner he always assumed when about to embark on a discussion of unpleasant matters.  Snape poured milk into his tea and tried to pretend he didn't notice the Headmaster's serene gaze.  _Not this morning.  Not any morning.  Not this mor-_

     "Good morning, Severus," the Headmaster greeted him amiably.  

     His voice was far too pleasant, and Snape took this as a very bad sign.  He cringed inwardly.  "Headmaster."  Cool.  Neutral.  Perhaps if he were churlish enough, Albus would call off the charge.

     "Another long night?  You look tired."  Undaunted.  Clearly not breaking off the assault.

     Damn.  "No longer than usual."  He left the second part of that sentence unfinished.  _Since you've saddled me with that incorrigible child known as Rebecca Stanhope._  He scowled into his blueberry scones.

     "I can't help but notice that you've been spending quite a bit of time with Miss Stanhope."

     "Yes, well, she needs a great of remedial tutelage."  He chewed a scone without tasting it.

     "Indeed?  That's the reason for all the detentions, then?"

     "That, and her appalling mulishness."  From the corner of his eye, he saw McGonagall drop her fork and square her shoulders.  _Bloody hell._

_     "_Has she shown any improvement since tutoring began?"

     Snape thought about last night.  Her cuts had been cleaner, and though the end result was the same, it demonstrated that she was making an honest attempt.  The oral quiz had illuminated a startling understanding of the mechanics of the subject, and even her writing, while still enough to make his eye burn, was progressing.  "Yes, I think so."

"Does she cause problems in class?"  Dumbledore pushed his spectacles onto the bridge of his nose.

     "Aside from her gross incompetence?  No."  His appetite was fading.  He wiped his mouth and dropped his napkin onto his plate.

     "She is only 'incompetent' because you refuse to allow her access to implements that would lighten her burden considerably," McGonagall cut in, putting her teacup down with a clatter.

     "We've been through this before.  I am not giving her an advantage over the other students," he said flatly.

     "It wouldn't be an advantage; it would be evening the odds," retorted McGonagall.

     "And as I have told you before, Minerva, life is unfair."

     "No need to make it worse," she huffed.

     "We could argue our philosophies until the end of the age.  It won't make any difference.  Besides, Miss Stanhope's Potions ineptitude is not what this is about, is it?"  He was tired of playing games.  "Rather, I imagine it's her _incontinence _you wish to discuss."

     The High Table fell silent.  Every member of the staff had heard about the Stanhope-Snape incident-most of them from a livid McGonagall-and they were keenly interested in hearing Snape's version of events.  Someone, maybe Vector, coughed in the sudden stillness.

     "Severus, you have absolutely no tact," spat McGonagall.  Several students craned at the High Table to watch the brewing storm, a phenomena becoming more and more commonplace.  Aware of their curious gazes, she lowered her voice.  "Really, Severus, isn't it enough that you humiliated her in front of her peers?  Do you have to make light of it?"  Her breakfast was forgotten.

     "I am making light of nothing.  The fact is that she urinated on my floor.  Any humiliation she suffered was her own doing," he snapped.

     "How can you say that when it was you who put her in that position in the first place?"  She jabbed her finger at him.

     "I most certainly did not," he bristled.  "She was the one who squandered numerous earlier opportunities to use the lavatory.  Why should I be held accountable?  Is there an additional medical infirmity of which I am unaware that would excuse her loss of control?"  He cocked an inquiring eyebrow at the Headmaster, who had been watching this latest wrangling between his two best professors without a word.

     "As far as I know, no other such incidents have been reported, and no note about bladder disorders was made on her record," he offered, stirring his tea thoughtfully.

     Snape sat back with a triumphant smirk.  "Then, as far as I am concerned, the responsibility for this matter lies entirely with Stanhope."

     "Even so, there most certainly must have been other underlying factors that caused her to do such a thing," McGonagall persisted.  "She's transferred from a different country, away from her friends and thrust into unfamiliar surroundings.  Perhaps it was all too much for her."

     Snape looked at his colleague in disgust.  "That has nothing to do with it.  Every first-year who boards that train on the first of September goes through the same thing, and they don't piss themselves.  Stop making excuses for her.  It solves nothing.  What happened that day was a result of poor decision-making, pure and simple."

     "Excuses?  You think I am making excuses for her?"  McGonagall's voice had risen dangerously, and the other professors shifted uncomfortably in their seats.  Flitwick was trying so hard to appear enamored with his tea that he choked on it.  "I am _not_.  I am merely trying to make sure that you don't do permanent psychological damage to that child just because you don't want her here."  She was staring at him with undisguised fury.

     "Psychological damage?" he repeated incredulously.  

     It was the most absurd thing he had ever heard.  In all the time he had spent with Stanhope, he had discovered many things about her.  She was willful, distant.  She protected herself with an iron fortress.  Her mind was as quick as her body was slow.  She was most certainly not a candidate for psychological damage.  In fact, she was probably the only pupil within these walls who he could not break with his hateful tongue.  At this point, anyway.

     "She has many problems; a weak mind is not one of them."

     "And how would you know that?  Are you admitting that you _have_ been trying to destroy that child?" came the shrill retort.

     The bald accusation in that question was like a slap in the face, and he sat forward so quickly that he upset his teacup, sending cold tea into his congealing eggs.  "Is that what you think?  That I'm torturing her during detention, trying to break her mind like an eggshell?  Tell me, Minerva, have you asked Stanhope about any of this, about how she feels?"

     McGonagall looked nonplussed.  "No.  I didn't see the need."

     "Why don't we do so now?"  He pushed his chair back from the table with a brutal scrape, and swept down the dais toward Stanhope.  He was not surprised to see that she was waiting for him, her own chair parallel to the table.  McGonagall's light, quick footsteps pursued him.  No doubt she suspected that he was about to throttle Miss Stanhope in front of the entire student populace.  Dumbledore's measured stride also reached his ear.  

     _This is becoming a regular event_, he thought dismally.  _The Daily Hogwarts Teacher Dancing Bear Parade._  Stanhope was a calamity never-ending.  First bumbling Neville Longbottom, and now a living scourge in the body of a fifteen-year old girl.  Throw in the constant hectoring of McGonagall, and he was beginning to wonder if his contrition was worth the trouble.  He risked a furtive sidelong glance at the Headmaster.  Yes, it was.  Every bit of it.

     "Miss Stanhope, come with me," he ordered shortly, looking down his long nose at her rounded shoulders.

     Her face betrayed neither surprise nor concern, but her eyes moved between the three professors in front of her, and he could see the question in them as easily as if she had asked it.  _What do they think I've done this time?_  It was a look of weary resignation.  Just as quickly as it had been, it was gone supplanted by vague inscrutability.  The defenses were up.  She was on high alert.

     _Either I'm growing more proficient at reading her, or she is growing lax about hiding herself.  _Either way, it was an encouraging development.  _She's not invulnerable, after all._  With a final appraising glare, he spun away from her and stalked from the Hall.  That she was to follow him went without saying.

     She waved goodbye to Fred and George, who were watching the drama uneasily.  _See you later, _she mouthed, then added to herself, _I hope._  She turned and followed Snape.  

     He was furious again; she could see in his long, stiff strides and in the set of his jaw, but she didn't think he was furious at _her_, not directly.  When he had escorted her back to Gryffindor Tower just after midnight, he hadn't said a single word, nor had he given any sign that he was any more displeased than usual.  He'd left her at the portrait hole with a terse "Goodnight," and disappeared.  So unless the very sight of her now inspired a simmering rage inside his bones, someone else had stoked the embers of his wrath.

     Actually, it wasn't all that hard to figure out what was happening.  McGonagall was on one of her crusades again, and now they were all on their way for another lively chat about "how she was feeling" or how "her needs could be better met."  She rolled her eyes.  More amateur psychologist doublespeak was the last thing she wanted to hear, but it looked like there was no escaping it.  Honestly, she wished Professor McGonagall would just let things be.  She only made things worse.  Every time she tried to intercede on her behalf, it only antagonized Snape further.

     It was going to be one hell of a fight this time, too.  The air around Snape was crackling with black, tightly controlled emotion, and McGonagall, marching resolutely behind her, was no better.  Though she could not see her, she had the distinct impression that her Head of House's eyes were glued to the pale back of Professor Snape's neck and shooting daggers of molten indignation.  Only Professor Dumbledore seemed unaffected by all of the hubbub.  He strolled a few feet away, stroking his long, white beard thoughtfully.  He exuded serenity, and she instinctively swerved to get closer to him, to duck beneath his sheltering, peaceful aura.

     He looked down at the sound of her approach and smiled, eyes twinkling.  "Good morning, Miss Stanhope," he said genially.  "So sorry to disturb your breakfast."

     "Good morning, Headmaster."

     "I shouldn't worry about this.  You've done nothing wrong.  Professor McGonagall simply has some concerns she thought important to discuss."  He patted her shoulder reassuringly.  Thankfully, she didn't flinch this time.

     "Oh, all right, Headmaster," she said, feigning a relief she did not feel.

     The walk down the corridor and subsequent ascent of the rotating staircase was little different than the one a few days before.  Sullen, tense, and hostile, three teachers and one hostage to fortune spiraled upward to the summit, and all of them had their own agendas.  Snape was bent on proving his innocence against charges of gross mental cruelty.  McGonagall was determined to do just the opposite and see a man she had never really trusted pay for sins past and present.  Dumbledore was simply trying to retain control of his faculty.  And Rebecca was doing what she had always done.  Watching and waiting.

     At present, she was watching the spotless black plain of Snape's cloak.  It rippled as he shifted his weight from one side to the other.  Today it was plain cotton.  On other days, it was velvet or wool.  On the night of the Welcoming Feast, it had been silk.  All of them, like this one, had been meticulously clean and crisply pressed.  She was tempted to touch it, tug it, see if it was cool or baking with its wearer's own internal heat, but she knew better.  If Snape caught her touching his clothing, he'd rip her fingers off at the knuckle.  Enough to know that his clothes were a reflection of him, immaculate, unadorned, and severely utilitarian.

     She took a deep breath, inhaling his spicy, clean scent.  It really was odd of her to be sitting here sniffing a teacher that held her in no sort of esteem or affection whatsoever, but she found it calming.  It was steady, a hallmark of his rational profession, and a stark counterpoint to the mercurial chaos preparing to erupt around her.  He shifted again, and a puff of scented air washed over her face.  Her blood pressure dropped ten points.

     "Are you all right, Rebecca?" McGonagall asked sharply, mistaking her deep breathing for the onset of some asthmatic fit.

     "Yes, ma'am."  Her blood pressure surged again.  So much for relaxing.

     "If you trample my heels in your fit, Miss Stanhope, the repercussions, should you recover, will be severe."  Snape's voice floated from the riser two steps ahead.

     She suppressed a snigger.  Dependable as clockwork with his jibes, was good Professor Snape.  Such an arrogant bastard!  With all the things he had said and done since her arrival, she should hate him, and there were moments when she did-the day she had urinated in his classroom, for instance-but for the most part, she felt only vague dislike, occasional fear, and an unshakeable curiosity as to what made him what he was.  Sitting in his classroom was like studying a tiger without the benefit of a cage; it was dangerous and unpredictable.  Just when she thought she had discovered the thing which would crumble the barrier of his resistance, make him see her for both her talents and her shortcomings, he put up another, crueler obstacle.  

     Just like last night.  For a split second, she had seen unwilling appreciation in his eyes, but then the veil had dropped over his shining black eyes, and he had struck at her with his cutting tongue.  Flush with her success, she had never seen it coming, and he had scored a deep hit.  Worse yet, she had betrayed that fact.  She hadn't shut that particular door fast enough, and now that he knew it was there, he would come back to it, picking and niggling at it like a master locksmith until he threw wide open.  She had to be careful now.

     "Can you be any more beastly, Professor Snape?" hissed McGonagall.

     Rebecca could feel him tense.  He was strangling on an acid retort.  He shifted again, more violently this time, and she saw the muscle in his jaw twitch ominously.

     _Leave it alone, McGonagall, just leave it alone._

     What was wrong with the woman?  Yes, Snape was a mean-spirited pain in the ass, but his goading and vituperation were hardly life-threatening.  Her internal defenses, while sorely tested, were holding admirably, and in a perverse way, she was enjoying the battle of wills.  She had a feeling that things had barely begun, and that, as bad as things had been, this was still only the testing stage, the process of feeling one another out.  Snape, she suspected, had not even started to bring the full extent of his pressures to bear.  When he did, it was going to be all or nothing, winner take all.  She had to be ready, and with McGonagall constantly running interference, she was bound to miss important signs and clues, perhaps even the critical blow.

     _She suffers from the malady that affects every would-be saint, girl.  She thinks you need her help._

_     I do, just not that kind.  Snape is up to no good, but he's not trying to kill me.  I don't think he's dangerous._

_     Yes, you do.  You still think about his hand squeezing your shoulder.  It bothers you._

_     No, I-all right, so I do.  Who wouldn't?  It freaked me out.  I wasn't expecting it.  Still, I think it was an accident.  His face wasn't exactly a picture of glowing satisfaction.  In fact, for a second there, he looked horrified.  Then he put ointment on it.  Not exactly the actions of a man set on my injury or death._

_     Maybe not.  But you be careful.  Keep on your toes.  Keep watching.  Keep waiting._

_     I will, Grandpa.  I always do._

The stairs slid soundlessly to a halt, and the Headmaster opened the door to his office and went inside.  They followed suit.  McGonagall closed the door behind her.  Snape came to a halt in the center of the room, arms folded across his chest.  He scowled at nothing in particular.  McGonagall took a position behind the Headmaster's desk, eyeing her adversary with seething rancor.  The gloves were about to come off.

     _Christ, this is going to be a blow-up.  No minor scuffle, not this time.  And I'm going to be right in the middle of it.  _The thought made her stomach clench.  Nothing good was going to come of this.

     The Headmaster seated himself behind his desk and gave her a beaming smile.  He reached for a crystal dish of lemon drops on his desk and offered it to her.  "Lemon drop?"

     "Thank you, sir."  She took one, hoping she didn't swallow it whole before the discussion was over.  Her lips puckered as the bitter tang coated her tongue.

     "Quite bitter, aren't they?  They're a favorite of mine.  Professor McGonagall?  Professor Snape?"  He offered the bowl to each of them in turn.  McGonagall shook her head stiffly.  Snape eyed the sweets with loathing.  Unperturbed by their rejection, Dumbledore set the bowl on the desk, sat back in his chair, laced his fingers across his chest, and waited.

     McGonagall fidgeted with the sleeve of her robe and then said, "Is there anything you wish to discuss with us, Miss Stanhope?"

     _Get those defenses up right now.  _The thought was an urgent command.  She brought the walls down with a resounding crash.  She sensed the answer to this question was very important.  McGonagall was fishing for something.  The question was too general.  All three of them were looking at her with discomfiting interest.  To buy time, she said, "Like what, ma'am?"

     She surveyed her professors through half-lidded eyes, pretending to straighten her robes.  Snape gave nothing away.  He was absolutely motionless in the center of the room.  His eyes bored into her, his mouth a thin line.  She flicked her eyes to the right.  Dumbledore gazed at her, his blue eyes searching her face with casual scrutiny.  She raised her eyes to where Professor McGonagall sat.  She was fidgeting more than ever.  If she weren't careful, she would pick the stitching from her robe.  

     "Well," began McGonagall, obviously at a loss as to how to broach the subject, "specifically, we would like to know about Potions class, that is, if you feel everything as is it should be."

     _Where is this going?  _She had no idea what the woman was talking about.  Had Snape confessed to bruising her?  No, if that were the case, they would not be having this discourse now.  Snape would be going before a disciplinary committee, and she would be getting a signed letter of apology from the board of directors.  Something else was afoot here.

     "I'm still not sure I understand the question, ma'am."

     Snape rolled his eyes.  "What the ever-eloquent Professor McGonagall  really wishes to know, Miss Stanhope," he murmured testily, "is whether or not I, in my black and evil malice, have been torturing you during detention."

     She did swallow her lemon drop then, but fortunately for her, it had dissolved enough so that she did not choke on it.  She stared at Snape in disbelief.  To her right, McGonagall was red-faced and sputtering.

     "I meant no such-,"

     Snape cut her off.  "So, Miss Stanhope, please enlighten us.  Since the disgusting incident in my classroom, have you experienced any ill effects?  Nightmares?  Uncontrollable weeping?  Hallucinations?  Inexplicable urges to curl into the fetal position?"  He said all of this calmly, matter-of-factly, but wounded anger brimmed just beneath the surface.

     _They're kidding.  They have to be kidding._  They weren't.  The Headmaster would never waste her time or his own with such a terrible joke.  They watched her expectantly.  What did they want her to say?  Her accident in Snape's classroom had happened three days ago, the passing of an age as far a she was concerned.  She had trained herself long ago not to dwell on things already done, things she could not change.  Wetting herself-horrible pun damn well intended-was water under the bridge.  Aside from a minor moment of sniveling self-pity the night it happened, she hadn't given it any thought.  And yet, the three most distinguished professors at Hogwarts had obsessed over it enough to warrant this meeting.  Incredible.

     She did something none of them had been expecting.  Given the circumstances and the importance of the people present, it was probably the least wise thing she could have done, but frankly, she was at a loss.  There was nothing else she could do, aside from continue to stare at them like a dithering fool.  She threw her head back and laughed, her arms reflexively pulling toward her chest.

     McGonagall was staring at her, her eyes widened in alarm.  Probably on the lookout for an impending attack of frothing insensibility.  This made her laugh even harder, and she sat back, tears streaming down her face.  Through the hazy blur of tears, she could see Professor Dumbledore watching her without a word.  He absently popped another lemon drop into his mouth.

     "Are you quite finished?" Snape asked coldly.

     She wiped her shaking hands across her eyes, huffing and tittering.  "Yes, sir," she managed.  "I'm sorry.  That was just the last thing I expected."

     "Perhaps now you will be so kind as to answer my question."

     "Yes, sir," she said hesitantly, unsure of how to proceed.  "Well, no, I haven't had any of those things.  Why do you ask?"

     Snape smiled thinly and shot a smug glance at McGonagall.  _There!  You see?  _He did not answer her.

     "Well, you see, dear, we are well aware of your delicate condition, and we thought that perhaps Professor Snape, with his demanding curriculum and constant night tutoring, was becoming too much for you," offered McGonagall, adjusting her spectacles.

     "Let us be perfectly clear, Professor McGonagall," snapped Snape, "_you_ thought it was proving too much for her.  I think no such thing.  In my opinion, Miss Stanhope, while inept and lacking in the courtesy to visit the lavatory before class, is perfectly capable of attending my class.  Whether she ever contributes to it is another matter."

     That was high praise coming from Professor Snape, but Rebecca kept her mouth shut.  If she acknowledged it in any way, he would pervert it, turn it into a stinging, bitter barb.  He was glowering at McGonagall, arms folded across his chest like a shield.  His glittering eyes dared her to contradict him.

     "Rebecca," Dumbledore said, kindly, entering the fray for the first time, "do you feel Professor Snape treats you fairly?"

     That was a difficult question.  No, he didn't treat her fairly, but he didn't treat anyone else fairly, either.  He was an equal opportunity bastard.  She sneaked a glance at Snape.  He was watching her with wary eyes.  McGonagall, too, was watching, leaning forward ever so slightly in her chair.        

     She bit her lip.  "Permission to speak freely, Headmaster?"  McGonagall suddenly sat up straight.

     "Of course, dear."

     She could feel the tension radiating from Snape.  The smell of allspice intensified.  _He's waiting for something.  But what?  _Then it struck her.  _He's waiting for me to tell them about the bruise._  She turned her head to look him in the face.  His fingers were curled around his elbows so tightly that the fabric of his robes was crumpling, shifting with a soft hiss.  His eyes were flat, his mouth a non-existent line.  _He thinks I'm going to hang him._

     She returned her attention to the Headmaster, who was waiting patiently.  "While Professor Snape is hardly the most congenial of instructors, I don't think he treats me any worse than the others.  He treats everyone unfairly."  Her ears caught the soft hiss as Snape relaxed his grip on his elbows.  Dumbledore's lips curled in the faintest of smiles.

     "Headmaster, might I suggest that Professor Snape wait outside?  Perhaps Rebecca feels uncomfortable discussing him in his presence."  McGonagall was looking at Snape with a cool, calculating expression.

     Several things passed through Rebecca's mind in the space of seconds.  Her respect for McGonagall, negligible since their first awkward meeting at the train station, plummeted.  Did the woman really think her so weak-minded as to be intimidated into silence by Professor Snape?  She _was_ afraid of him, but it was a healthy fear.  She feared him the way she feared electrical outlets or crossing a busy street.  He was intrinsically, undeniably dangerous, but she was aware of the danger, and she accepted it.  She certainly wasn't going to cower in abject fear and refuse to speak her mind at the mere sight of him.

     Something else bothered her, too.  There was something familiar in her attitude, something that stirred unpleasant memory.  A face flashed in her mind.  Deidre.  Haughty, self-assured Deidre, who decided who would be accepted at the insular world of D.A.I.M.S.  Deidre, though she hadn't forced pitiful Judith Pruitt to end her sad life, had certainly given her no incentive to stay.  That was who McGonagall reminded her of now, taunting, bitchy, cruel Deidre.  She had already decided that Snape was undeserving of kindness of trust, and she was trying to cut him off at the knees.  She had found her other, and now she was using Rebecca as an excuse to bring him down.

     _She's waiting for the blood; she wants me to give it to her._  Judith's face filled her mind.  She had watched one person be torn down.  Was she going to watch another?  

     _Since when have you given a damn about Professor Snape?_

_     I don't.  _

_     Then what's bothering you?_

_     That McGonagall is trying to use me for her little game.  There's a difference between watching something happen, and being used to make it happen.  I won't give her the rope to hang him with; I won't help her do this._

_     Why do you care?  Snape hasn't exactly endeared himself to you._

_     Because,_ she thought irritably.

     Because some things were just simply, inalienably wrong; not even the bleak perspective cast by disability or the nihilistic survivalism of a place like D.A.I.M.S. could make it otherwise.  To accuse a man of wrongdoing and then exile him from the room so that he could not hear the aspersions cast against him was one of those things.  Even Deidre had possessed the dubious honor to ridicule Judith Pruitt to her fat, pimply face.  Whatever she had to say about Professor Snape, she would say to his face or not at all.

     "If you please, Headmaster, I would prefer that Professor Snape remain here."

     McGonagall drew herself up.  "Miss Stanhope, you have no authority to make such a request," she said briskly.

     Rebecca's temper slipped.  _Sneaky bitch._

_     Mind your tongue.  Mouthing off to a teacher will get you in deep, deep trouble._

_     I don't care._

_     You'll care plenty when you're on your way back to King's Cross Station._

That thought sobered her just enough to avert disaster, but her nails continued to dig into the soft flesh of her palms like pricks of conscience.  "You're absolutely right, ma'am," she said, struggling to retain her equanimity.  "I meant no impudence.  I only meant to say that I am not bothered by Professor Snape's presence."

     McGonagall's shoulders relaxed.  "Apology accepted."

     Albus watched everything silently, his fingers steepled beneath his chin.  He wondered if Minerva had seen; he was almost certain she hadn't.  He had.  So had Severus.  He could tell by the way the younger man was looking at her.  His black eyes were riveted on her, as though he were waiting for it to appear again.  Though no one else would have been able to detect it, Dumbledore knew that the Potions Master was torn between incredulity and irritation.  He himself was more than a little worried.

     The expression had been quick, no more than a fraction of a second, but it was there.  She was still pressing her fingernails into the tender palms of her hand.  At the suggestion of sending Severus outside, young Stanhope's face had contorted with contempt, maybe even loathing.  The anger lingered in her eyes, dark and smoldering, embers in dry tinder.  The mask had slipped effortlessly into place, but the eyes told all he needed to know.  At the present, the girl was not at all fond of Minerva McGonagall.

     "Miss Stanhope, what is a typical detention with Professor Snape like?" he asked, hoping to distract her from her fury.

     She looked at him, and the fury left her.  She gave a small smile.  "Not much.  Mr. Filch drops me off at eight o'clock sharp, and I stay until Professor Snape escorts me back to Gryffindor Tower."

     "At what time is that, generally?"

     She shrugged.  "There is no set time, sir.  I've stayed as late as four o'clock in the morning."

     "Four o'clock?" cried McGonagall.  "That's entirely too late!  No wonder she has such dark circles beneath her eyes."

     He saw Rebecca shoot her Head of House a mutinous glare.  The fingers that had begun to relax curled tightly again.  "And what do you do during this time?"

     "I work on the Camoflous Draught, sir.  Professor Snape says I have to keep trying until I get it right."

     "I see.  Do you enjoy it?"

     "Enjoy?  Not exactly, but I do find it interesting."

     "Oh?"

     "Yes, sir.  I like getting the chance to prove I can do something."

     Dumbledore nodded.  "Do you and Professor Snape speak?"

     "Not usually.  He is busy with other things.  Sometimes, he quizzes me on potions."

     "Do you feel comfortable with him?"

     "Yes, sir.  Why shouldn't I?"

     "No reason at all."  He sat back, and Rebecca knew the interview was over.  "Well, I see nothing out of form here.  Miss Stanhope seems to be in good spirits and none the worse for wear.  I do ask, Severus, that you end your detentions no later than half past twelve.  You both need your rest."

     Snape nodded stiffly.  McGonagall stood to leave.  Rebecca rested her hand on her joystick.

     "Off with you, then."  He dismissed them with a smile.

     He watched them leave, his mind lightning-quick behind his light-hearted smile.  They were all sending signals that his sensitive emotional antennae detected.  Most were visual, slight treacheries of the body that spelled out their inner feelings in every twitch and stiff footstep.  The predominant feeling of the moment was anger, followed closely by mistrust.  Severus, as was his wont, was stalking from the room, hands curled into fists beneath his cloak.  His face was hard; his eyes glittered with unspoken frustration.  McGonagall was striding along at such a clip that she was just short of running.  She gripped her wand like a lance, jabbing it forward with every stride.  Even her hat sat stiffly upon her head, an exclamation point of disapproval.

     Sandwiched betwixt them was Stanhope, and he found her most interesting of all.  Anger flowed from her; it seemed to shimmer around her twisted limbs in a gossamer suit.  This did not surprise him.  The anger was always with her.  It ebbed and flowed, but it was ever there.  The darkness within to fight the darkness without.  What did surprise him, though, was at whom that swirling, infectious rage was directed.  

     Though McGonagall was her Head of House and self-appointed protector, Rebecca was pulling away from her, putting as much distance between them as she could.  She was, in fact, staying as close as possible to Severus Snape, narrowly missing his heels.  It was abundantly clear, that, no matter her intentions, the young lady wanted nothing to do with the woman behind her.

     _What other surprises do you have for us, Rebecca?_  The thought lingered in his mind for a moment, and then he put it aside in favor of the supply reorder form sent in by Professor Sprout.


	11. Fortuna's Wheel

Chapter Eleven

     Severus Snape was a very unhappy man.  He swept through the corridor, a black-eyed, wrathful devil.  His temper was not improved by the fact that Stanhope was close upon his heels.  He had been trying to get rid of her since he stepped off the spiral staircase, but it was no use.  She hovered in his wake like a lost puppy, the motor of her infernal machine whining fretfully.  More than once he had felt a soft tug as her wheels grazed the hem of his cloak.  If he got back to his chambers tonight and found a rend or a scuff, the girl would have detention until her final breath.  He longed to whirl around and spew his curdled venom into her stoic face, but he didn't dare, not when his emotions were so volatile.  There might be another…loss of control, and he was sure Stanhope would not lie a second time.

     "What do you want, Stanhope?" he snarled.

     "Nothing, sir."  Bland.  Polite.  Fastidiously inoffensive.  Utterly infuriating.

     "Then go away.  I neither requested nor wanted your company."

     The pace of the chair slackened but did not cease.  She was still behind him.  He could sense her there, an invisible weight upon his shoulders.  Merlin, why didn't she go away?  Did she think he owed her something for keeping her word in there?  That would be typical Gryffindor.

     _She's hardly proven a typical Gryffindor.  How do you know she's Gryffindor at all?  She could be Ravenclaw._

     Well, she was certainly intelligent enough for it.  

_     Or Slytherin._

     She was most certainly not Slytherin material.  She lacked the bald ambition, the cunning, the unabashed ruthlessness of his House children.  She could never be one of them.

     _Does she?  What drives her through all those hours of detention, if not ambition?  You're blind if you don't see that.  She reeks of it.  The only person who might be more ambitious is Draco Malfoy.  And don't hand me that claptrap about cunning, either.  She's got that aplenty, too.  Look how she managed that rosehip vial._

Snape scowled.  So she was ambitious and cunning.  That proved nothing.  She still didn't have the requisite ruthlessness for his House.

     _Oh?  Lock her in a room with McGonagall for a few hours and see what happens._

Yes, that was most peculiar.  Minerva was generally beloved by her students; she was their stern, yet protective matriarch.  They knew they could depend upon her.  Yet Miss Stanhope did not share in the popular sentiment.  The look she'd shot McGonagall in the Headmaster's office had been so ugly, so full disdain that it had taken him aback.  It was not the look of a loyal, headstrong, fearless Gryffindor.  It was the furious, brooding face of…

     _A first-year Slytherin._

     Bollocks!  This was ludicrous.  The girl absolutely _did not_ belong in Slytherin.

     _Why not?_

_Because.  Because she isn't Pureblood,_ he thought, unable to come up with any other answer.

     _No charity for the child that kept her word, then?_

     He didn't need to be reminded of _that._  His stomach cramped at the thought that now he owed a child he despised only slightly less than Harry Potter twice.  Sometimes honor was a disgusting thing.  He made a strangled hiss of frustration deep within his throat.  The girl was maddening.  What did she want of him?  What was behind her inexplicable need to defuse McGonagall's artillery, to take his side, however tacitly, in this little tug-of-war?  This went beyond some warped sense of Gryffindorian honor.  Most of the Gryffindors would have happily handed down his death sentence, probably eating strawberries and cream all the while.  Something else was motivating her, driving this misplaced instinct to protect.

     _Maybe she recognizes something in you, some part of herself._

     _Don't be ridiculous!  We're nothing alike.  I'm not one to wallow in self-pity._

     Even as he thought it, he knew this wasn't true.  As much as he hated to admit it, they were alike in many ways.  More ways than he was comfortable contemplating.  He saw the similarity in the little things.  It was in her expressionless white face, her idiot refusal to let him into her mind.  It was in the defenses with which she surrounded herself, in the smooth stone wall of her indifference.  It was in the way she watched things from beneath half-closed eyes, assessing, determining, labeling, and cataloguing without giving herself away.  He even saw it in the fleeting sneer she fixed on Potter in the Great Hall during supper, the scorn that passed over her face like white shadow when she saw him with his sycophant friends.

     Her reaction to Potter was intriguing to say the least.  As the father had been, so was the son.  He was the Golden Child, revered by his schoolmates for his unmatched talent on the Quidditch pitch, his bravery in the face of the encroaching Voldemort menace and adored by most of his instructors for his politeness and good manners.  To this day, Colin Creevey followed him around like an orphaned gosling, despite the fact that Potter had made it clear that he was not going to be accepted into the Holy Triumvirate.  McGonagall, much vaunted by legions of former students as the no-nonsense, laissez-faire lioness who refused to play favorites, had bestowed upon the boy a new, state-of-the-art racing broom paid for from her personal account.  Such clandestine gifts were expressly forbidden, as stated in the Hogwarts employment contract, but when he had pointed this out to the Headmaster, Albus had done little more than smile at him.  The normal rules did not apply to Harry Potter.

     He drew everyone to him with his light.  Everyone who loved the Light, that was.  The children of darker things fled from him, shied away from his luminescent aura, fled into the gloom to nurse their sordid hatreds.  Draco shunned him because he had achieved all that the Malfoy fortune could not buy.  He, Snape, turned away from him because he could not face the recollections he inspired.  Now Stanhope, sent into the bosom of the Light without any other passport than Dumbledore's trust, was turning her face from him.  He wondered what that said about her.

     It could be nothing more than simple jealousy and resentment.  It was not an uncommon thing.  He suspected that many of the students here held a bit of contempt for Potter, though none would confess to such a thing, not even under threat of death.  To speak against Potter was a form of blasphemy.  Be that as it may, Potter was wizarding royalty, a rags-to-riches story of the first order, and it was only natural to resent someone who went from nothing to everything in the blink of an eye while you struggled for every scrap of recognition.  Even Weasley, Potter's stalwart best mate, had succumbed to bitterness for a time during the Tri-Wizard Tournament.  The only true fans of fairy tales were those lucky enough to have lived them.

     _Whatever lives inside her, it isn't simple resentment.  It's much, much stronger, more bitter._

     He could feel it emanating from her as she rolled behind him, a crackling, swirling mantle of unfocused but frighteningly virulent vitriol.  Right now it was latent, waiting patiently, going before her like an invisible barrier; back in the Headmaster's office, it had been concentrated, vibrant, searching.  It had come off her skin in undulating waves, and for an instant he had been reminded of steam rising from scorched, rain-dampened pavement.  Then Dumbledore had asked his gentle questions, and it had dissipated, shrinking back into the pores of her skin to await the next eruption.

     The steady whirr of her chair was driving him to distraction.  Its soft whine drilled into his head like an auger, a voice of confusion, of disorder.  He whirled to face her.  He had to get away, had to think.  If he could think of a subject other than this defiant changeling child, all the better.

     "Miss Stanhope, please stop following me.  Your chair is not the slightest bit soothing," he snarled.

     "No, sir, it isn't." she agreed drily.  "I wasn't following you, sir."

     "Then why have you been dogging my steps ever since I left the Headmaster's office?" he demanded.

     A few paces behind her, McGonagall was frozen in place, watching them.  Her hand gripped her wand tightly, as though she were preparing to bring it to the fore at once should he pounce upon the unsuspecting Stanhope.  Her obvious suspicion grated on him like sandpaper.

     "Oh, for Merlin's sake, Professor McGonagall, I'm hardly going to murder the girl.  Grievous bodily assault will suffice," he muttered.

     McGonagall stalked by with a curt "Good day, Professor Snape," and as she passed, he watched Stanhope very closely.

     Her eyes followed the trail of McGonagall's robes, and he saw the stony glimmer of mistrust in them.  Her gaze was flat, reptilian, and he felt the anger coalescing around her again, falling over her like a warm, greasy fog.  The knuckles of her hand were white as she gripped her joystick.  He heard the dry crack as one of her nails broke.  She appeared not to notice.

     "Why, then, have you been dogging my heels?" he repeated, more loudly than he had intended.  He just wanted to rid her of that strange, unnerving stare.

     She started, as though pulled from some deep trance.  "I haven't, sir.  This is just the way to Arithmancy."

     She looked at him with her angular, thin face.  There was no guile in it, no malice.  Her eyes were watchful but not dull.  She had not retreated fully behind her fortress walls, but she was prepared to fall back if the need arose.

     _What are you hiding behind that face of yours?  What don't you want the world to see?_

     "Well, get on with it, then," he said irritably, put out at not having noticed the obvious.

     "Yes, sir."  She veered around him and continued down the corridor.

     He watched her go, pondering the secrets she hid behind her mask, and he resolved to himself that before he drove her out, he would discover them, even if he had to strip that calm veneer away a piece at a time.

     Minerva McGonagall had concerns of her own, and while Severus Snape pored over his dour imaginings and wielded his implacable lash over a group of cowering third-years, she pondered them.  None of her charges were aware that her mind was not fully upon the lesson she was teaching them.  Like all teachers, she was an expert poker player, able to wear the guise of authority and control even when she felt anything but.  Her lips never faltered and her pointer tapped the blackboard in all the right places.  She was cool and collected and a million miles from her Transfigurations classroom.

     She was still in the Headmaster's office.  She was thinking of Severus.  Of Stanhope.  Of both of them.  There was something between them, some connection that bound them together.  The way they looked at one another spelled it out quite neatly.  A secret had passed between them, elusive as dust in sunlight but potent as slow poison.  Two blank slate faces threw off furtive sparks like tiny warning flares.  Then the walls had gone up, and the moment had passed.  Stanhope had turned her frail face to Dumbledore, and Severus had watched her with his sullen, predatory gaze, waiting to see what she would do.

     What were they hiding, concealing behind stone countenances, one by will and the other by force of will?  Had Severus done something to her?  Had the legendary temper slipped?  He prided himself on his self-control; he had flaunted it over the years, smiling or scowling at the countless aspersions cast at him by the students and staff, shrugging them off with a bored blink of his eyes.  It was his sole vanity.  But Stanhope rattled that aplomb, shook it to its very foundations.  The cool detachment he affected with everyone else was useless against her.  She burrowed beneath his skin, as relentless and silent as a chigger.  He could not help but respond.  Perhaps that resentment at being unable to break her, stifle her beneath his heel as he so effortlessly did with the rest had at long last compromised that rigorous self-discipline, and he had lashed out at her.

     It wouldn't surprise her if he had.  Whether Headmaster Dumbledore wanted to admit it or not, Severus was a very angry, bitter man.  Personally, she thought him dangerous.  Sometimes when she sat at the High Table, though she was a seat separated from him, she felt the rage coiled in a tight, rancid ball at his core, seething and twisting beneath his pasty skin, infecting him, contaminating him with its icy, burning touch.  There were times when the weight of his anger was so intense and so terrible that she had to fight the urge to push back her chair and flee.  On those days, the fury would shine from his eyes like a malignant beacon, and she would look at Dumbledore, eating contentedly, and think, _Albus, can't you see?  Why won't you _see_?_

     Her mouth told the tale of turning buttons into bonbons, and her mind, as agile and cunning as the Animagus body she often inhabited, continued its thoughtful prowl around the conundrum of the living enigma that was her colleague and the waifish child so recently entrusted to her care.  The ties that bind were often ethereal, yet so very strong.  She saw it again, that calculating momentary look.  Secrets made strange bedfellows, but she had to concede that this was the strangest pairing she had ever seen.

     Severus had made no secret of his enmity of the young Rebecca Stanhope.  He had been against the acceptance of a transfer from the outset, glowering and muttering each time the subject was brought up in staff meetings.  "We can barely teach the pupils we have now; why accept another from a backwards country just beginning to emerge from beneath the thrall of rampant Puritanism and the hysteria inspired by repressed lust and the fugue of suspicion?" he had muttered, taking an ill-tempered sip of Earl Grey.  Dumbledore had murmured a reassuring vague platitude and moved on to other matters.

     To be fair, he hadn't been the only one to voice such concerns.  Flitwick had spoken up, too, and she herself had plied her old friend with dozens of questions, some of them downright rude.  Only Binns had declined to join in the discussion, opting, as he always did, to sit in his chair by the fire and think on things done in his more corporeal years.  They had gotten no answers to their queries, of course, none that they could hang their hats on.  Albus had let them find out what they needed to know for themselves, and it was proving to be a most interesting and enlightening experience.

     Most of the teachers, while taken aback at first, had adjusted quickly.  Flitwick came into the Headmaster's office at the end of her first week for the twice-weekly staff meeting practically singing her praises.  She was quiet, he said, well-mannered, surprisingly skilled at Charms.  Whatever reservations he had held, they were no longer of concern to him.  Vector, too, was pleased, remarking on her attentiveness, her willingness to take instruction, and her ability to stay on task.

     She had not offered her opinion.  In truth, she had none to offer.  She hadn't known what she thought, and she still didn't now.  She had never been faced with a student like Rebecca before, and, though it pained her to admit this, proud as she was of her richly deserved reputation as a problem-solving, level-headed woman, she had no clue how to handle her.  The child was not disobedient; she caused no problems in class.  She did her work as quietly and as efficiently as she was able.  In short, she was a dream student, yet she wasn't.  She made her unaccountably nervous.

     Each class, she waited for the warning tremors of disaster, for the sticky slowing of time that presaged calamity.  Every time there was a quick, indrawn breath or the heavy crack of a dropped textbook, she fought the urge to spin around with her hands clapped to her mouth in horror.  She fully expected to see Rebecca on the floor, her thin, twisted limbs dancing jerkily in the grip of convulsion, drool flecking her face and glistening on her chin.  There was no reason she should think such a thing, but the thought clung to her all the same, like a thick coat of cloying humidity.  Sometimes, the feeling of anticipation made her fingertips throb and tingle, tiny pinpricks of electric fear crawling beneath her nail beds like the tickling, microscopic feet of ants.  Such a scene had not yet greeted her eyes when she looked back, but the possibility was there, like ominous, swollen thunderheads gathering on the horizon.

     Fear that she was going to collapse and go to her death in the middle of the Transfigurations classroom wasn't the only thing that unsettled her about the girl.  Her behavior outside the classroom was strange, often disturbing.  She rarely spoke.  She secreted herself in her room with her house elf companion or hid in the shadowiest corner of the Common Room with her nose in a book.  Sometimes, she played Exploding Snap with Neville or Seamus, and the Weasley twins were always welcome for a chat, but the others were silently rebuffed.  She had yet to say a single word to any of the members of her dormitory, and as far as she could tell, she never engaged in friendly gossip.  A frosty smile was her only social contribution to Common Room chatter.

     She was such a cold child, and that was a shame.  She had seemed far friendlier at their first meeting, and then something had shifted.  Her eyes, bright with curiosity and happy enquiry, had dulled, grown wary.  Formality came to the forefront, polite and guarded, but most clearly not inviting the aimless, meandering talk of people getting to know one another.  Then Fred and George had come, and the coldness had thawed, but only for a while.  The minute she had returned to the car, the formality was back, glazed over her hollow, disconcerting face like cooling porcelain.

     _Well, no mystery there?  How did you expect the girl to feel?  You _were _ogling her shamelessly._

_     Well, _she thought defensively, _it not as if it was a new experience for her.  Surely I wasn't the first person in the world to be curious._

_     No, but you are old enough to know better._

     That was hardly the point, and it had nothing to do with her current worries.  Right now, she was preoccupied with Severus Snape and his potential to do harm to an already bitter, impressionable mind.  The man was as tactful as an undersexed rhinoceros.  The devastation he could cause to the psyche and self-image of that girl was immeasurable in her estimation, and Severus would blithely destroy her and not give a bit of a damn if he did.

     She found it highly suspicious that he was spending so much time with that girl.  There had to be more of a reason behind it than civic concern for her academic future.  Altruism was not a word to be found in his lexicon.  There was a darker motive behind everything the man did, even if you couldn't decipher it.

     _Dumbledore would disagree with you._

     _Toss what Dumbledore thinks._

     She loved the man and would follow him unto the ends of the earth and past the gates of Hades should he ask it, but he was so single-minded that he often failed to see certain risks.  Voldemort was an enemy as old as time, and after decades of waiting and patient watching, Albus had discovered many of his ways, shed light on some of his polluted idiosyncrasies.  He had concentrated so very hard for so long on the head of the great, evil serpent that daily twined its noisome length ever tighter around their world, but for all his intensity, for all his devotion to this most worthy of crusades, he still knew dangerously little about the daily workings of Death Eater operations.  He was so desperate for information, for clandestine entrance into that secret and terrible world that he was only too willing to accept one of their wayward children into the fold.  Even after all this time, it still turned her stomach.

     Dumbledore placed so much trust in Severus, and she couldn't see why.  As far as she could see, he hadn't done much to earn that confidence.  For all his claims of gathering vital information against their enemies, she hadn't seen much difference, much improvement in their situation.  They still knew precious little, still blundered in the dark for answers and for hope.  Innocent people still died, their mangled corpses left to greet the dawn.  Voldemort's way of letting them know that he knew they were watching, of thrusting their impotence back into their faces.

     Yes, Severus was tortured, sometimes horribly so, if the grunting moans that drifted from the Hospital Wing were any indication, but so what?  He was a Death Eater, former or otherwise, and though she had tried to expunge the brutal thought from her mind, tried to supplant it with mercy, with empathy, and with dignity, she could not shake the notion that it was no more than he deserved.  He had to pay for his sins somehow.  He had chosen to have that repulsive mark seared into his flesh, had probably worn it as a badge of honor in the not too distant past.  So why shouldn't he be tortured?  He had earned it.

     Dumbledore's voice sounded dolefully in her head.  _Oh, Minerva._

     She shoved it aside.  He could lecture her about conscience and compassion all he liked, but she was never going to be able to muster much for Severus.  Even if she wanted to, the perpetually bruised outline of that obscene brand upon his arm precluded it, quashed it beyond hope.  Too many good, honorable souls had died because of it, fallen before its merciless, eyeless face.  She would share a table with it because she had to, but she would not pity it.

     Now Severus, with his soul that festered like the blackest of bile, was stalking Stanhope.  He sensed her weakness, her vulnerability.  Perhaps bitterness called to bitterness.  Maybe he sought another soul to twist and corrupt, to drag into the never-ending darkness of self-hate and pity.  Maybe he had discovered that the redemption he claimed to seek was beyond his reach, and he had decided that if he could not have it, then he would drag another soul down with him.

     There was no call for him to keep the girl for four hours or more every night.  He hadn't done so with Neville Longbottom, who needed all the help he could offer and more.  Nor had he done so with Potter, who he despised.  It must be exhausting for her.  Potions was precise work, and Severus was unrelenting.  It was just another example of his petty cruelty.  But then, what else could you expect from a former Death Eater?

     What was he doing with her?  He could be being cruel for cruelty's sake; he was a hard man, and he took joy in tormenting his students.  Yet there had to be another, more substantial reason for keeping her to the exclusion of all others.  Before she came, he assigned more detention than all of the other faculty members combined.  Since, only one name appeared night after night beneath his name on the disciplinary scrolls.  He wanted her alone, but for what?

     _Perhaps he is sexually abusing the girl._

     The thought was so stark and sudden that she trailed off.  She didn't think it likely or even possible.  Severus had never shown the slightest interest in the opposite sex, or in any sex, for that matter, and Stanhope was hardly the candidate for wanton seductress.

     _She is the perfect victim, though.  She'd never fight him off._

     Even so, it was ridiculous.  Rebecca had shown no evidence of physical abuse of any sort.  She had been at ease with him in the Headmaster's office-no cowering, no frightened haunted eyes.  Severus Snape was a great many things.  A sex fiend was not one of them.

     "Professor?" came an anxious voice from the back of the room.

     "Yes?"  She shook herself.

     "Are you all right?"

     "Quite.  Just getting dotty in my old age."  She forced a small smile.

     That brought a smattering of laughter.  She resumed her lecture, and when she found her rythmn again, her mind drifted back to its musings.

     _What do you want with her?_

     The question was fast turning into an obsession.  

     _Do you honestly think he's up to nefarious misdeeds down there, that he is meticulously, methodically poisoning her mind with ways and ideologies he swears he's surrendered?_

She didn't know, but he could.  Stanhope had her own wellspring of gall and wormwood, her own pet prejudices to nurse, her own deep-seated mistrusts.  Any one of them could be the minute fissure that would allow him in, the single flea bite that begot the plague.  If it was there, Severus could find it.  He was patient.  He was calm, insidious, water wearing away at the unbreakable stone.

     _But he hates her.  Do you really think he would impart his darkest, most arcane secrets to someone he has crucified in public? _

She wasn't so sure of that, not anymore.  Not after this morning.  Yes, he still disliked her.  Quite strongly, in fact.  But the hatred was no longer as pure as it had once been.  There was something else now, something akin to thoughtful curiosity in his eyes when he looked at her, as though he were studying a beautiful but particularly deadly flower, as though he were figuring out how to draw the poison from it without harming himself.

     _Bit paranoid, don't you think?_

     No, she didn't.  Not after everything that she had seen over the years.  Not when Peter Pettigrew, James Potter's best friend, could betray him to his death.  Not when she had sat two seats removed from an agent of Voldemort at the High Table and never known it.  Nothing was too paranoid in these times.  She hadn't seen the dangers before, but she was going to be ready for them now.  She would watch, and sooner or later, one of them would tip their hand, and the truth would come out.  There would be no second Peter Pettigrew.

     So, she did watch.  When Stanhope arrived just after lunch, she observed her throughout the lesson, puzzling over her every move, her every expression.  As always, Rebecca was quiet and still.  Her eyes followed her path around the room.  Her expression was flat, contemplative.  She looked so much like Severus that she had to make a conscious effort not to stare.

     _She knows I'm watching her.  She's not giving anything away._

     She deliberately paced around Stanhope's desk several times as she lectured, letting her well-practiced teacher's instinct discern her mood.  It was all very casual and unobtrusive.  The girl's gaze matched her track, sliding to the right until observation was no longer possible.  She did not turn her head when she passed behind her, nor did she react when she placed a hand lightly on her shoulder.  She stayed attentive and seemingly at ease.

     Her body might have betrayed nothing, but McGonagall sensed a subtle change in the air around her.  Expectancy hummed.  She felt it brush the sensitive flesh of her cheeks like the inquisitive tap of a cat's paw.  She continued her calm circuit around the room and fumbled inexpertly through the random swatches of feeling emanating from her strangest student.

     It was difficult.  The walls she had built around herself over the years were thick and heavy.  She couldn't imagine what could have formed such forbidding defenses in one so young.  Grizzled old Aurors were not so insulated.  Still, there were fleeting chinks in the defenses, hairline cracks that let some of what she was feeling escape.  If Stanhope knew they were there, they wouldn't last long.  She would patch them, shore them up.  For now, though, they were there, and she groped among them, seeking answers from their jagged gouges.

     She concentrated carefully, calling upon all her experience and all the students she had ever known.  An emotion she wasn't quite sure how to interpret was rolling off the child.  It was strong and bitter, like chicory coffee.  It was wary, watchful.  There was sadness, too, sorrow that she could not quite grasp.  Anger, relentless and cold and embedded in the very root of her, pulsed beneath her skin.  There was no hatred, not yet, but the seeds were there, waiting to germinate and spread their corrosive pollen.

     Just then, Rebecca turned her head and looked at her.  The gaze was so frank and so direct that she almost took a step backward.  _Trying to find your way in, Professor?_  Her mouth twitched in a wry smile.  It was not friendly.

     _You're going to be a delicate one to handle, aren't you?  I'm going to have to be quick, very quick, to catch you out.  Well, see if I don't._

She moved to Rebecca's desk.  "Miss Stanhope, now that I've explained the theory, why don't you give it a try?"

     "Yes, ma'am."  Not the slightest bit flustered.

     Rebecca's hand moved painstakingly to her wand, which lay on the edge of her desk.  McGonagall watched her effort with interest.  She never did anything quickly.  Everything was slow and measured and desperate, and each hurdle passed was an accomplishment unto itself.  The thin, gnarled arm inched painfully outward, an earthworm creeping out of its hole beneath the shadow of a goshawk.  Then, five pallid fingers flexed tremulously outward to wrap around the fat, smooth shaft of her wand.  They snapped closed again, engulfing it in cool flesh.  The arm retreated.  Her eyes flickered upward in triumph.

     She held the wand over the specimen to be Transfigured, a ferret.  Her blue eyes locked onto her own appraising hazel ones, and when she received an encouraging nod, she proceeded.  Her wrist moved jerkily as the hand rotated.  It was a singularly ugly motion, devoid of any fluidity whatsoever.  Up.  Right.  Down.  A wide, uncontrolled arc.  She would never earn points for form.  It was like watching the straggling movements of a worn Wizard photograph.

     Graceful or not, her jerkings were effective.  She murmured, "_Subuculus!"  _A pink flash heralded the change from ferret to shirt.  Where the lithe animal had been, there sat a crinkled tan shirt.  Not a trace of ferret hair to be seen.  She put down her wand.

     "Well done, Miss Stanhope.  Ten points to Gryffindor."

     There were happy smiles at this from the rest of the Gryffindor contingent.  Stanhope actually earning points in their favor was a rarity.  Usually, she was on the losing end.  Snape's deductions had been catastrophic.  Even after almost three weeks of hard work, the House was still in negative territory.  Minus one-hundred-and-thirty-five, to be exact.  Some of the more cynical members of the group had taken to calling her Relapse Rebecca because each time it seemed Gryffindor would manage to regain its footing, Snape would strip another eighty points from beneath their feet.  The epithet was never used to her face, of course; Gryffindors were kind in their cowardice.

     Rebecca did not smile at the compliment or reward.  She looked at her for a moment as if gauging her sincerity.  That strange, unpleasant smile surfaced again, and then she turned and faced the front.  _Nice try, Professor._

     Realizing that things had reached a stalemate for the time being, McGonagall fell back and retreated behind her own walls to formulate her next plan of attack.  Something told her that it was going to be a long and ferocious battle, a psychological war of attrition between three formidable minds, and whoever succeeded in cracking Stanhope's defenses first was going to come out the winner.  Severus had quite the head start, and she had the sinking feeling that she had entered the game too late.

     Draco Malfoy was also watching Rebecca Stanhope, but he had absolutely no interest in finding out what lay behind her eyes.  He had no stake in her psychological state at all.  She could be absolutely mad for all he cared.  He was watching her because he couldn't _not_ watch.  She compelled him the way the meaty, stinking reek of death compelled the vultures and carrion crows.  He was repulsed by her, by the very thought she could exist, and yet she fascinated him.

     She was ugly.  She was the ugliest Mudblood he'd ever clapped eyes on; she beat out Granger in a landslide.  It made his eyes hurt to see her.  She was so distorted.  She went against every dictum of taste he had ever been taught.  So small and wasted and trollish.  Each time he saw her, he shivered.  Sometimes he wondered if she wasn't a glamour.  No human being so hideous could be part of the natural order.

     Her hair was beautiful, though.  The Fates were funny that way.  It was like liquid sunshine.  Smooth as new satin and a shade darker than his own.  It was incongruous on her otherwise mangled form.  It was like finding teeth on a duck.  It glittered in the sunlight that streamed through the cut glass windows.  It had a queer, prismatic quality to it, gathering the light and refracting it into a thousand tiny, golden points.  It reminded him of visits to his family vault at Gringotts.  Gold everywhere, twinkling with its own mysterious power.

     He still remembered their encounter on the train.  He never forgot a grudge, not a single one.  He kept them in a ledger in the deepest corner of his mind, and sooner or later, he balanced all accounts.  They went back to his earliest years, to his toddlerhood.  The majority of the older debts had been collected.  Red lines crossed neatly through long-forgotten names.  A few were still outstanding, but rest assured they would be brought to date before long.  Crabbe and Goyle, for instance, were still paying.  Only one name held his attention now.  It was burned into the pages.  _Rebecca._

     The train had been most educational.  Who knows what he might have learned had not prudish old McGonagall interfered?  Stanhope was difficult to provoke, but Professor Snape proved it could be done.  So did the cinnamon bun in the Great Hall.  She was trenchantly, recklessly loyal, a trait she shared with the insufferable Harry Potter, and it was her one weakness, at least the only one he had found so far.  He could get to her through her friends.  It would be easy.

     The thing was, he didn't want to take the easy route, not with her.  Taking the simpler path with Potter and his insipid little friends had inured him against the simpler pleasures of malice, filled him with languid ennui.  He wanted something more challenging, a cleverer mouse to make the kill more satisfying.  And Stanhope was becoming a most _interesting_ mouse.

     People often thought him unobservant, brashly cocksure, but that wasn't true.  He _was _cocky; even he wouldn't deny that, but he was not unobservant.  On the contrary, he liked to study things, especially opponents.  He was careful, so very careful.  He never let anyone know he was watching, gathering, filing things away.  He let them think he was careless.  He was loud, strident, and ostentatiously arrogant.  He distracted them with his mouth and his cool, smirking face, and while they were fuming and grumbling and brandishing their wands at him like detachable codpieces, he was quietly taking inventory, evaluating strengths and weaknesses.  He was getting ready.

     He never went for it all in the first confrontation.  That was a quick path to certain defeat.  There were too many variables.  You never knew what could happen.  He instigated small, inconsequential skirmishes first and watched his foe react.  It didn't matter if he won or lost.  What was important was the information.  It was better to lose.  That way, while his adversary was busy preening and crowing about his victory, he was left in peace beneath the ignoble but concealing cloak of the temporarily bested.  They all thought he was licking his wounds, but he was really analyzing and categorizing, preparing for the next opportunity.  They were all looking for short-term results, quick gratification.  They didn't understand.  He was more concerned with the long-term.  When the bloodshed ended, and the piles of rotting corpses swayed over the landscape, he was going to be on top of them, grinning and holding the reins of power in bloody hands.

     Stanhope wasn't going to be easy quarry.  It was almost a pity that she was such a foul waste of life.  From what he had seen, she was much like him.  She was patient.  She knew the importance of the watch.  She saw everything.  She, too, was a gatherer of information, a collector.  He imagined she hoarded each bit of knowledge just as he did, and he suspected that she could be ruthless enough to use it as a formidable weapon if she wished.  She would make the game fun.  If by chance she proved hardier than even he had imagined, there was always her physical weakness to attack.  He could snap her limbs and listen to her scream.  A tad less gratifying than the utter mental victory for which he hoped, but as his father so often told him, a win was a win.

     He wasn't sure when the opportunity would present itself, but he knew it would.  If he was patient.  He smiled to himself and returned his attention to Professor McGonagall's explanation of the magic process behind ferret Transfiguration.

     Rebecca was a watcher-child, and she was well aware of the eyes on the top of her head and drilling into her back.  She had been observing Professor McGonagall for the entire class, a silent soldier sizing up the opposition.  Her dislike for the woman sharpened and settled into the pit of her stomach like the beginnings of an ulcer.  Her mouth twinged with the desire to sneer.

     She was trying to get into her head, trying to see, trying to steal her secrets.  The old marm was not very subtle.  Her pryings were clumsy, amateur.  She could sense her curiosity, her urgency, a pheromone in the stale air.  She was too desperate for the answers.  She would overlook things, misinterpret them in her haste.  She was not patient.  Not like Professor Snape.

     Professor Snape.  Her first and favorite nemesis.  She almost smiled at the thought of him.  He knew more about her than anyone else on the staff.  Unsurprising since she spent so much time in his company.  He was harsh and he was cold, and his eyes glittered with ill-concealed malice, but at least he was truthful in his hatred.  He did not hide it behind politics or propriety.  He held it up in all its ugly glory.  She knew exactly where she stood with him and what to expect, and she respected him for it, was comforted by it.  She could sooner respect an enemy she knew and feared than an ally she ridiculed.

     The same went for Draco, though she couldn't say why he was staring at her.

     _Perhaps he finds you attractive._

She coughed behind her hand to discourage a spate of giggles.  If that had any chance of being true, then it also held true that any moment now she was going to leap from her chair and dance about the room with breathtaking grace.  Draco Malfoy was attracted to no one but himself, and even if he were capable of tearing his eyes away from the task of perpetual self-admiration, she would be the last person on his list of people to ogle.  He was a rich, arrogant, pampered little ass who was enthralled only by physical beauty, and that was not one of her attributes.

     _Even if you were physically perfect, you'd still be a Mudblood._

     There was that.  She turned her head to try and catch a glimpse of him.  She could just see a sliver of platinum hair and a flash of smooth cheek.  He was beautiful, and it grated on her.  It wasn't fair.  Spoiled little jerk had everything-money, status, an assured future thanks to his wealthy father.  He shouldn't have Davidian beauty, too.  The scales should even out somehow.  To have all of that and beauty would not be permitted by a just God.

     _Who ever told you God was just?  You know better._

     She was living proof of God's injustice, and even if she could look past the evidence of her own limbs, she had lived among other examples of his cruelty for nearly all of her days.  The blind.  The deaf.  The crippled.  The warped souls struggling through their individual journey with bruised, faulty brains.  Each was a victim of the stacked deck handed them along with their birth certificate.  If God could be so miserly with some, it stood to reason that he could be exceedingly generous with others.

     McGonagall ended the lesson, and some of the tension ebbed from her body.  Her relief was not to last.  Before she had put her chair into motion, McGonagall's voice cut through the shuffle of feet and the creak of desks as students filed out.

     "Miss Stanhope, may I see you a moment?"

     "Yes, ma'am."  The bile in her gut began to churn.  Draco passed by, his eyes flicking between the two of them, the cool, appraising smirk glued onto his face.

     When everyone was gone, McGonagall motioned for her to approach the desk.  She did, biting on the inside of her cheek to maintain the veneer of unruffled implacability.  She was sure she wouldn't like what the professor had to say.  She was looking at her with that expression of benevolent condescension that made her head pound with frustration.  Her left hand curled into a fist again.

     They surveyed one another across the desk for a few minutes.  Rebecca could feel her groping for an opening, for a pleasant entry into the conversation.  She was also looking for a flaw in her defenses, a means of attack.  Rebecca battoned the hatches and smiled.

     "Miss Stanhope, is there anything you wished to tell me now that we are alone?"

     _Bitch._

     The thought was vicious. It was a mental stab at her adversary, wild and jagged.  Undiluted anger surged through her veins.  Blood beaded beneath her fingernails.  Dislike spiraled toward hate.

     _Did she really think I'd turn tail and confess everything?  Did she?  I've got more spine than that.  She underestimated me.  Even if I wanted to screw Snape, I wouldn't.  Not for her._

     The urge to turn and leave without answering was an overwhelming compulsion.  She had to stuff her hand beneath her leg to keep from reaching for the joystick.  Blood pounded in her temples.  She looked at her teacher's face and willed herself to take deep, even breaths.  She willed her chest and throat to loosen.  

     _Don't tip your hand.  Don't give her the victory._

"No, ma'am," she said quietly.

     McGonagall stared at her a moment longer, perhaps hoping she would change her mind.  Then she said, "My door is always open, Miss Stanhope."

     _Step into my parlor, said the spider to the fly, _she thought.

     "Thank you, ma'am.  Will that be all?"

     "Yes.  You may go."

     She left as quickly as she could.  Ahead of her, a cunning mind plotted revenge.  Above her, an even more brilliant mind sorted through her motives while cursing her name.  Behind her, her protectress searched for guidance not to be found.  Fortuna's wheel began to spin.

     The circle of Fate tightened around them all.          

                


	12. Armistice by Fire

Chapter Twelve

     Draco Malfoy was smiling.  Not smirking, as was his wont, but smiling.  He even smiled pleasantly at Crabbe and Goyle in the Common Room before breakfast.  This made them very nervous, indeed.  They had known him from earliest childhood, and never in their long and grudging partnership had he looked upon them with any favor at all.  They had grown to accept his sneers and taunts, view them almost as tainted, warped gifts.  At least he knew they were alive.  So, when Draco smiled at them, Vincent Crabbe felt a sudden urge to sit down upon the couch.

     That did it.  The smile vanished, replaced by an irritated grimace.  "What are you doing?  Get up, you stupid prat!  We're going to be late for breakfast."

     "All right, Draco.  Sorry."  He dutifully got up and followed him out of the Common Room.

     He was relieved, actually.  Sniping meant he was back to himself again.  A kinder, cuddlier Draco would have been quite worrisome.  There would have been questions, suspicions, and if there were one person he feared more than Draco, it was his father, Lucius.  The man was cold, colder than subzero chill, and if he even thought that one of them had been mucking about with his only son, he would kill them without hesitation, children of family friends or not.

     Though Vincent Crabbe couldn't see it, Draco was still smiling when they walked into the Great Hall, thought not quite so brazenly.  If Potter and his gaggle of harebrained groupies caught him smiling gormlessly at nothing in particular, they were bound to stick their noses where they weren't wanted.  Today was a wonderful morning.  He had such plans.  If things went well, Rebecca Stanhope would find herself in world of trouble before the day was out.

     He had been thinking, planning.  All night, even after going to bed, he had thought about her, what he had learned, and between Goyle's bonesaw snores and the sleepy muttering of Crabbe as he wrestled with uneasy dreams, pieces of the fractured puzzle had begun to fall into place.  One by one, he examined them, fitting them where he could.  Goyle snored, and he seized on the first element.  Rebecca.  Her body.  That frail, thin, wreck that twitched and jerked at the slightest provocation.  It could prove useful, he had realized; indeed, it could be a boon.  It was her weakness, her worst enemy.  He had smiled in the dark.

     The second ingredient in his potent tincture of malice came to him just after he had rolled onto his side, arm propped beneath his head.  Professor Snape, Head of Slytherin and a sure ally.  He hated Stanhope, and he made no secret of the fact.  His constant berating of her had become a form of entertainment for most of Slytherin.  Not that Draco could blame him.  He saw her for what she was, no doubt.  He understood as well as anyone else that she was useless, a blight, and unfit for society.  And he would, naturally.  He was a proper Slytherin, after all.  Aside from his father, Professor Snape was the most Slytherin man he had ever met.

     The third element was not a separate entity at all-it was merely the manipulation of the two personalities at his disposal.  One would have to be played against the other.  He was certain he could manage it.  Both of them were suicidally proud and stiff-necked beyond redemption.  Once backed into their fighting corners, they would have no other choice, as they saw it, but to come out swinging.  Under no circumstances would either retreat or surrender.  It would be a bloodbath, and an enjoyable one at that.  All he had to do was give things a bit of a nudge in the right direction.

     Snape had even helped with that part, too.  A bastard _and_ a thorough teacher.  The man was extraordinary.  He was constantly carping about her ineptitude, about the danger she presented to him and the other pupils.  It had become part of his daily routine, like his brooding menacing stalk into the classroom and his rabid sarcasm that he lobbed at the hapless students in his way.  It was getting a bit tired, but perhaps he could make some use of it, be the Delphian Oracle that brought the prophecy to pass.

     _Oh, you are good._

_     Of course I am.  I'm a Malfoy._

     He slid into his customary seat at the Slytherin table, indulging in the self-congratulatory smile for one second more before slipping into the more familiar disapproving sneer.  Crabbe and Goyle flanked him immediately, their large, square faces filling his peripheral vision.  The Great Hall was filling with groggy students straggling from their Common Rooms, puffy-eyed and gravel-voiced.  The first-years came last rubbing their eyes and looking every inch the sniveling, pathetic children they were.  Even the Slytherin first-years disgusted him, small and rat-faced and weak.  Some of them still looked for their parents in the morning.

     He poured himself a glass of pumpkin juice and took a sip to cleanse his throat of the morning muck that was always there when he awoke.  On either side of him, his flunkies were already well-ensconced in their breakfast plates.  The sounds of their lip-smacking and open-mouthed chewing were almost enough to put him off his own food, but he managed to take a bite of warm, buttered roll.  He let his eyes wander to the Gryffindor table.

     Rebecca was already there, wedged between the Weasley twins, who were chattering animatedly into her ears.  Her bent back was to him, so he couldn't see her reaction, but knowing the Weasleys, they were probably marveling her with witty jokes from their vast repertoire.  Her shoulders were quaking.  It could be laughter, or it could be just another one of those odd contortions that sometimes assailed her.  Her improbable hair shone in freshly-washed splendor.  The house elf had braided it for her, but a few wisps had already escaped their bonds, and they tickled her neck with their golden threads.

     He popped a piece of bacon in his mouth, fastidiously wiping the grease from his fingers with a linen napkin.  _Shoddy workmanship like that would earn our house elves a proper and deserved beating._

     _Well, any work on Stanhope is an improvement._

     _Yes, but still; you'd think she'd have some care about herself._

_     Don't be silly.  This is a Mudblood we're talking about.  And a deformed one to boot._

     As he watched, she brought a glass up to her face with a shaking hand.  She nearly dropped it, then recovered her grip.  Miraculously, it returned to the tabletop unspilled.  Her infirmity was like a beacon, and he watched it manifest itself in a thousand little ways.  It undermined everything she did, but it affected _her_ not in the slightest.  The force of her will, her personality, still radiated cleanly and powerfully from its battered lighthouse.  Yes, she would be a worthy opponent, and he would consider beating her a fine achievement.

     _Don't underestimate her._  His father's voice.

     Father needn't have worried.  Underestimating her was not going to be on his rather lengthy list of mistakes.  He knew better.  He had never underestimated anyone, when it came down to it.  Tested them, yes, but not underestimated.  It was a technique he had learned from his father.  Lull them into a sense of smug superiority, of safety, and then, when they were least expecting it, move in for the kill.

     She was not expecting him.  He could tell by her relaxed posture.  For the first few days after their squabble on the train, she had been watchful, alert.  Her eyes had darted to the Slytherin table every few minutes to make sure he was still where he should be and not sneaking up on her with his wand drawn.  He had never moved, never given any indication that he saw her.  He continued eating and talking, and eventually her caution had waned.  She looked less and less often at him, going half an hour at a stretch without a glance.  Now, she wasn't bothering with him at all.  She thought the danger was past.  She was so comfortable that she sat with her back to him.  How foolish.

     He watched the Gryffindor Table with interest.  No longer was it a cohesive unit; Stanhope had made it a House divided.  There was no rancor.  No, Gryffindors would never allow that, but there were two distinct camps now-those who accepted and embraced her, and those who tolerated her because they must.  It amused him to see that Potter and his friends apparently fell into the latter camp.  Obviously his noble protection of the innocent and helpless did not pertain to her.  Good.  It would make things easier for him.

     _Doesn't say much for him, does it?  Exposes him for the raging hypocrite he is.  Some Gryffindor sensibility._

     Actually, he was behaving exactly like a Gryffindor.  Noble when it suited him and exercising the better part of valor when it didn't.  Gryffindors were opportunists, just like the Slytherins, maybe even more so.  At least Slytherins had the decency and audacity to admit it.  Gryffindors would hem and haw and recite the law while they sharpened the knife beneath their robes.  Slytherins would simply plunge it into your chest and smile while they did it.

     He thought about going over and stirring up a bit of trouble, but decided against it.  That might put her on alert again, and he wanted her calm and unsuspecting.  Besides, he knew what would happen.  The twins would leap to her defense, the furious red of their hair bleeding into their pale faces.  Rebecca's blue eyes would blaze and then go quiet as she slammed the damper into place.  Behind her thin lips, her sharp, venom-dripping tongue would quiver with the need to sting.  The rest of her Housemates would look away.  Not worth the risk.

     He shifted his gaze to the High Table.  Professor Snape was there, eating his porridge with a sullen, desultory expression.  Eating breakfast was not an act of survival for him.  It was an act of aggression.  His face was tight.  Angry stress lines creased his face.  He was in a miserable humor.  Perfect.  All the conditions were ripe for some beautifully engineered calamity.

     "Hello, Draco."

     He cringed, his teeth setting on edge.  She was the last person he wanted to talk to now.  Or ever.  "Pansy."

     She beamed at him, peeking from behind Goyle's beefy forearm.  She was an extraordinarily ugly girl, and looking at her stubby, pug nose and broad forehead made him weep for Pureblood genetics.  It was all well and good to date and marry within the insular confines of high wizarding society, but the rampant inbreeding was bound to produce unpleasant results upon occasion.  True, the Parkinsons were not nearly as noble or refined as the Malfoy family, which could trace its bloodlines for millennia, but one would think they would have had the good sense to hide her glaring deficiencies with an Appearance Enhancing Charm.  At least buy the girl some expensive cosmetics, for Merlin's sake.

     "You look pleased today, Draco."

     "I am."

     "Ooh, care to let me in on your secret?" she cooed, fluttering her eyelashes at him.

     "No," he said flatly.

     Her face fell, and her pathos made her even uglier.  He turned away from her, washing the bitter taste from his mouth with a sip of pumpkin juice.  That was enough of her for one day.  Everyone outside of Slytherin thought the two were an item.  Well, that was a laugh.  He couldn't stand her.  The only reason he'd escorted her to the Yule Ball was because Father had insisted.  

     _It will be good to form that sort of alliance, Draco, keep the power base strong.  Even I won't be around forever, and when I'm gone, you will require your own contacts, your own liaisons. _

     Draco had understood the meaning behind his father's words quite well.  It was obvious he hoped to marry him off, to forge an alliance between the two families through the union.  Unfortunately for father dearest, that was going to be a pipe dream.  He would do anything for his father, for the cause, but he wouldn't do that.  He refused to make any sort of alliance with Pansy Parkinson, let alone an accord between the bedsheets.  It had been all he could do to survive the Yule Ball with her.  He'd sooner court Millicent Bulstrode.

     At the thought of her name, his eyes slid to where Millicent sat ravaging her breakfast.  She was a human steam shovel, piling her food into her mouth gracelessly.  Her chin wobbled as she crammed a more than was decent forkful of eggs inside.  She was a tank of a girl, squat and thick, with beefy arms and a barrel chest.  She looked up at him quizzically, a glob of bacon grease dripping from her chin and a dollop of orange marmalade smeared on a cheek.  He looked away, lest she think he was flirting.

     _On second thought, celibacy is good._

     If the truth be known, Dina Knott was the most attractive of the Slytherin girls, for whatever _that_ was worth.  She had a small, pretty face framed by chestnut hair.  She also had very nice bubs, a fact he never failed to notice when he sneaked a peek in Herbology.  Sadly, she was thick as a brick.  If she could walk and twine her hair around her fingers at the same time, it was a good day.  It was the one thing he hated about Slytherin-an appalling dearth of desirable girls.

     Of course, there were reasons for that, or so he had heard.  The patrician Pureblood society placed a very great value on boys.  A penis made the world go 'round, as the old saying went.  Sons were spoiled.  Sons were glorified.  It didn't matter how stupid you were, how feckless, how inept in the ways of the world.  Your sex organs were your keys to the castle, your entry into the ivory towers of privilege.  If you were an only son, so much the better.

     Girls, on the other hand, were not so lucky.  They were valued only insomuch as they would become the brood mares to provide more boys, more walking, talking virility tokens for the men to exhibit at the never-ending succession of summer cocktail parties.  Aside from that, they were worth nothing.  Some of the wealthier parents, according to the legends passed around the Slytherin Common Room fire, would go to extraordinary lengths to get a male heir.

     Agrippina Delerov was the bogey most frequently mentioned in these sordid tales, the faceless witch who would give you the child of your dreams…for a price.  It was said that she would Transfigure girl-children into hearty, hale boys with her twisted, unholy magic.  The price was astronomical, rumored to be in the hundreds of thousands of Galleons.  According to the more macabre tellers of the lore, the price was even more treacherous and terrible.  The transformation was at Agrippina's whim.  If she felt so inclined, either from spite or from vengeance, she could reverse the spell, and some poor soul who had so assuredly been a male a moment before would suddenly find himself missing vital parts.

     The image of Julian becoming Juliette struck him as funny the first time he'd heard the tale, but before climbing into bed that night, he had conducted a thorough inspection of his undergarments to be sure that everything was anchored into place.  Not that he believed such nonsense, of course.  No record of any such happening had ever been recorded anywhere.  If it had, the _Daily Prophet_ would have pounced upon it immediately, splashing blaring headlines and gaudy photos across its front pages with unbridled glee.  The rest of the pages would be filled with interviews with hapless, bewildered victims and dissertations on the hows and whys of the phenomenon from every quack and pseudo-educated philistine in the land.  Charlatans would come crawling out of the rotten woodwork of Knocturn Alley with claims of cures or ameliorative nostrums.  Still others would claim to be the fiendish mastermind of the nefarious plot to rid the world of male Slytherins.  No one would believe them.  Everyone knew all that was evil stemmed from the mind and heart of Lord Voldemort.

     No, what he believed was much simpler.  Magic had nothing to do with it.  What he understood to be true with all his heart was far simpler, far more monstrous.  The girls weren't changed, bartered for boys through the machinations of a cunning, cruel witch.  They were killed, simply and methodically.  Maybe they were Killing Cursed in their swaddling while they slept.  Perhaps they were killed by the same doctors responsible for bringing them into the world, smothered quietly and without fanfare.  There were enough Slytherin Mediwizards to perform the task; medicine was a lucrative business, after all.  Even those not of the Slytherin persuasion could be convinced to do the awful deed if the price were right.  Greed was a universal malady.

     Things like that _had_ been reported.  Dead infants sometimes turned up amongst the refuse piles heaped and stinking in Knockturn Alley, and some green-faced young Auror was sent to retrieve the bodies.  There was usually an autopsy and an inquest, but nothing much ever came of it.  There were too many other concerns.  Outlasting the ever-growing pall of Lord Voldemort, for instance.  Besides, they were likely the unwanted children of destitute paupers.  Nothing to do but cremate the wretched things and move on.

     _Oh, if only they'd think of performing a Paternus Divinitio test.  What surprises would they find?  The secrets I could tell._

     He turned his gaze to the Ravenclaw table.  They had the prettiest birds there, and more than a few of them were inclined to the Dark.  They were intelligent, intelligent enough to recognize true power, at least.  Even if they didn't nurse the darkness in their own souls, they didn't mind being caressed by it from time to time. He smiled.  The stories he could tell if he wished.  He took another bite of bread.  Time was running out for Rebecca Stanhope.

     Rebecca had forgotten about Draco, but not through arrogance or ignorance.  She was simply happy.  She was rested and relaxed.  The curfew of midnight had helped her tremendously, though if anyone had asked, she would have insisted it made no difference.  The pounding headache that had dogged her incessantly was gone, as was the permanent cramp in her lower back.  Fred and George were excited about the looming prospect of Quidditch season, and some of their enthusiasm had passed to her.  Quidditch was still a novelty to her, and her sole experience with it-until the appearance of the Dark Mark and the ensuing pandemonium, that was-had left her exhilarated and eager to see more.

     So perhaps it was understandable that she was less cautious than she should have been.  If only the Fates were so forgiving.  Greater men than she had learned viciously, painfully of the soulless, pitiless caprice of the three sisters spinning, weaving, and cutting the threads of life, and that afternoon after a happy morning of Transfiguration in which McGonagall kept her prying, invisible fingers to herself, Fate's teachers came bearing a cruel lesson.  Ironically, it was a lesson Professor Moody could have taught with a great deal less trouble had she thought to ask him.

     Everything was as it always was when she rolled into Potions that day.  Snape was in his customary miserable humor, shooting her a seething, disgusted glare when she entered.  The Slytherins greeted her with snorts and sniggers, and the Gryffindors sighed and waited for the first salvo in the latest battle of two intractable wills.  In short, there was nothing to tip her off, to trip the delicate sensors of congenital wariness.  The trap was flawless.

     She took her seat and pulled out her parchment and quill.  Professor Snape insisted she write, so write she would.  No matter that it was illegible, a mess of indecipherable squiggles and lines and wobbles.  If he wanted it, then she would most certainly give it to him.  It was his eyesight, after all, and if he wanted to ruin it by squinting and scowling over her scratchings, who was she to tell him nay?  It sure beat the pants off the consequences.

     What _were _the consequences?  She didn't know.  Nightly detentions had become a de facto way of life, a routine as expected as Winky's thorough scrubbing when she returned to the Common Room at night.  They had long since ceased to be a true punishment.  They had changed into something else, a game, maybe?  No, not quite.  That was too trivial a term for it.  A contest?  Yes, that was closer, but still not what she was looking for.  An experiment?  Yes, that was it.  An experiment, a litmus test to see who was stronger.  To see, in effect, who had the bigger balls.

     _I shouldn't tell him that if I were you.  He's apt to show you._

     Not to worry there.  That was one little tidbit of sentiment she was keeping to herself.  If Professor Snape ever caught wind of the fact that she no longer considered time with him punishment, he would most certainly change that.  He was a man who prided himself on his pristine malice, and he would see her inexplicable enjoyment of his ill-intended castigations as a catastrophic failure.  He would seek out new ways to burden her, to add to the yoke around her neck.  He would purge her of such ideas any way he could.

     She hadn't expected to grow used to his malevolent scowls and savage snarlings, but she had.  They no longer frightened her.  They were only his idiosyncrasies, part of his personal landscape.  She still paid heed when he spoke, of course.  She was not yet that far gone in her complacency.  That voice was a magnet, a siren call velvet hammer that held her in its sway even as it sought to destroy.  It called her to attention even when she was on the teetering edge of exhaustion.  She knew when she heard it that it was trying to undermine her walls, her stolid castle of hard earned sanctuary, but she was powerless to stop it.  She couldn't very well tell him to stop talking.  Nor would she if she could have.  It was a pleasant erosion.

     She watched him as he wrote on the blackboard in his small, flowing script.  Chalk dust fell from the board onto his long fingers and the sleeve of his robes.  His touch was light and crisp.  Her own hand straggled and wobbled across the parchment beneath it, woefully behind.  She could tell by his posture-ramrod straight and tense as an overextended muscle-that he was on edge.  It was no mystery as to why.

     _Damn right it isn't._

     McGonagall and her meddling.  Her sanctimonious, stupid, irritating meddling.  Snape hadn't been at all pleased about the Headmaster setting limits on the time he could keep her in his dominion.  She had seen the muscle in his jaw twitch at the news.  He'd been murderous ever since.  Detention last night had been tense, and more than once he'd snapped at her for no apparent reason.  The motive behind his fouler than usual temperament wasn't that hard to figure out.  His classroom was _his_, dammit!  His to run as he saw fit, by God, and now thanks to McGonagall's whining, some of that treasured autonomy had been stripped from him.  He was being bridled in his own stall, and he was damn sure going to make his displeasure known.

     She wasn't thrilled about it, either.  Yes, the extra hours of sleep were badly needed, but the price for them was high.  Too high as far as she was concerned.  They were a concession to her disability, and she had made far too many of those.  Taking them made her look weak, needy.  Whether she needed them or not, she didn't _want _them.  She would rather faint where she sat than take any charity proffered by McGonagall.  

     _Rather unkind for someone who just got the best night's sleep they've had in weeks._

     Wonderful.  Now she would look healthy and vibrant, and old McGonagall would pat herself on the back for a job well done.  Rosy cheeks and clear eyes would justify her decision to interfere and pry, and then there would be no escaping it.  She would be at every turn, squawking and hectoring and making her life a living hell even as her physical body blossomed from the proper rest, nourishment, friendship, and fresh air.  The old crone would crow about her accomplishment, setting herself up as the courageous champion of the weak, while she and Professor Snape stewed and fulminated in the shadows, each nursing their own resentments.  She scowled.

     _Rather have the puffy bags beneath your eyes, the stiff, cracking joints, and the pounding headache?_

_     Yes.  If it means McGonagall will leave me the hell alone._

     Worse than everything else, McGonagall's pestering had lost her valuable ground in Professor Snape's eyes.  The grudging respect she'd fought for, clawed from the hard, unyielding soil of his heart had evaporated the instant Dumbledore handed down his edict.  She had seen it wilt and die.  Those eyes, which had just begun to regard her with something other than put-upon loathing, had closed off at once, dimming like electric lights with insufficient power.  Clearly, he thought she was pleased with the way things had developed.  Maybe he had even thought she had planned it.  In that moment, she grew to hate McGonagall.  Had the Death Eaters swooped in and killed her on the spot, Rebecca would not have so much as batted an eyelash.

     _What does it matter so much to you, his respect?  Why do you need it?_

Because it mattered.  Because she sensed that it was important, that it was valuable.  It was as rare and worthy as gold, and if she managed to mine even a fragment of it from the miserly vein that coursed through him, hidden by layers of thick insulation and daunting bitterness, she would have attained the ultimate prize, checked the cold black king and won the endgame.  If she could make him see her, even for an instant, as something other, something better than a nuisance, then he could never look at her the same way again.  Not in good conscience, anyway.

     _You're assuming a conscience._

     It was a big assumption, but she thought he did have one, eroded, pitiful, and anemic as it might be.  She saw it in him sometimes, flashes of strangled humanity that he quickly smothered.  He was never kind, to her or to anyone else, nor did he display emotion of any sort, but all the same, there was something oddly fragile about him.  Her eyes would catch fleeting motions of his body, momentary flickers of expression on his normally blank face.  She couldn't read the emotions, not the subtle, rarely seen ones.  They were too elusive, too quick.  The anger was all she recognized, and she recognized it easily because it was so often on her own face.

     She could read his body, though; it betrayed what his face would not.  Perhaps he had never felt the need to train it in the way it should go, in the art of deception.  For all these years, his caustic manner and sneering face had been enough to keep the curious away.  Sympathy quickly faded in the face of such cruelty.  Her own had.  No one had stayed close to him long enough to translate his silent language.  No one, save the Headmaster, had chosen to roll the bones and see what lay between their dry lines.  No one wanted to enter the cage and seize the tiger by the tail.  Now the tiger, through his own volition, had invited her into that cage and sealed the door behind him.

     And what had she seen?  What had he unwittingly given away?  Just enough.  Just enough to tell her that he was something more than stone and wormwood and slow, bitter poison.  Some nights as he sat hunched over his poorly lit desk, tearing the feeble defenseless souls from the parchments of his pupils, she caught a glimpse of a feeling unintended.  Most often it was desperation, a thick caul over his blank face.  It was in the set of his mouth, the unconscious curling of his lip.  Sometimes, it was in his thin, white hands, in the way he rubbed them together absently but compulsively.  It clung to him selfishly, a jilted lover refusing to take graceful leave.  Tenacious as terminal disease.

     There were other things, too, other parasites that clung to him.  Hatred was his bastard child, and he nursed it from the marrow in his frozen bones, but it was an unforgiving, gluttonous child, and it turned on its sire, demanding more of him than he could safely give, relentless in its avarice.  He didn't just hate her or the world; he hated himself.  Himself most of all.  He was his own most brutal critic.  Sometimes she would see him muttering to himself, the words too low for her to hear.  Other times he would suddenly slam his hand upon the desk in frustration, making her jump.  Then he would scowl at her as though she had caused some great mischief and peevishly tell her to get back to work.

     She caught a glimmer of something else at times, something so faint she couldn't trust that it was really there.  It was way down deep, a systemic infection that she couldn't quite grasp, a low-grade fever that made him look withered and drawn and yet far too young for his years.  She had reached for it only once, and he had looked at her so sharply and so speculatively that her slumbering fear of him had returned with startling asperity.  She was neither so impertinent nor so unwise as to try again.

     "Psst!"  Neville nudged her in the shoulder.

     She turned and saw to her horror that her quill had trailed off the edge of the parchment and wandered over the desk, leaving spidery, black trails of ink along the would.  She jerked it back where it belonged and shot Neville an apologetic look.  Snape would love that; yet another crime he could add to her list of transgressions.  Damn, she had to curb the mental wanderings.  They were going to get her into serious trouble.

     Neville was of the same mind, apparently.  He was eyeing the inky scrawls with growing trepidation.  He knew Snape as well as she did.  He looked from the marred desk to the narrow back of Professor Snape hovering in front of the blackboard, then back to the desk again.  He seemed to be considering something..  Then he sat forward, folding his arms across the desk and hiding the scribbles beneath them.

     Professor Snape chose that precise moment to spin around.  "As anyone with a modicum of sense can see, this is a most complex potion, but since none of you have displayed any notable intelligence to date, I shall spell it out for you.  This is highly dangerous work, and I expect you to exercise extreme care."  He sent a piercing glance in her direction.  "I will tolerate no carelessness.  Should a lapse in concentration or an error in judgment result in injury to another, I will personally see to it that the responsible party is expelled."  He sneered at the suitably terrified class.  Then his black eyes darted to Neville, who sat hunched and trembling over the desk.  His eyes narrowed.  "What's the matter with you, Longbottom?  Sit up at once.  Why are you lying across Miss Stanhope's desk?"

     Neville hesitated a moment, knowing what acquiescence would mean.  But when Snape folded his arms across his chest, his resolve abandoned him, and he sat up, offering her a guilty sidelong glance.  Black ink smudged his chin and it coated the desktop in a thick, uneven smear.

     Snape's face remained impassive, but when he spoke, he sounded absurdly merry.  "Ah, what have we here?"  He stepped forward and swiped an inquisitve finger through the ink.  He examined the tip of his finger, now blackened, and then scowled at her.  "More of your doing, I trust, Miss Stanhope?"  He raised an eyebrow.

     "Yes, sir," she muttered, looking at her hands.

     "I didn't hear you, Miss Stanhope."

     The malice that had begun to fade over the weeks beneath his unrelenting tutelage returned, reinvigorated by his petty torment.  She stared up at him, trying to match his stoicism with her own.  He said nothing, still as the statuary in a cemetery.  Only his eyes spoke of living things, of essence of being, of soul, and the things of which they spoke were warped and twisted, much like her own body.  They were diseased, and she looked away from them, suddenly frightened and sad.  The corner of his mouth turned in a small smirk.

     _How can a man live with a soul like that?  And what hell has he lived through to get it?_

     The questions were too big, too discrete for her to answer.  The impact of them made her feel ill, and she closed her eyes against a nauseating wave of vertigo.  When she opened them again, he was still there, pale face daring her to defy him.  Whatever she had seen in his eyes was gone, and in its place was the more familiar practiced nothing.

     _What did I see?  Oh, God in Heaven, what did I see?  _On the heels of that near-hysterical thought, _Did he know I saw?_

     All of her anger left her.  She felt it leave her in a physical release, a loosening of her chest and a relaxing of her chin.  It was impossible to sustain in the face of such naked hopelessness, such crushing self-recrimination.  She was seized with the ridiculous urge to grip him by the shoulders and shake him, to tell him that whatever it was that gnawed him in the landscape of his dreary dreams and haunted his heart, it couldn't be that bad.  It couldn't.  She also wanted to weep in terrified melancholy. A lump caught in her throat, hard and cold as gristle.

     _His heart is as hard as a stone, girl, buried beneath uncountable layers of hate and guilt and self-pity.  If something has gotten past all those barriers to burrow into the meat of it, into the small part of him that still exists, you better believe it could be that bad.  Maybe worse. _

"Well, Miss Stanhope?" he snapped.

     "Yes, sir, it was my doing," she said loudly when she could trust her voice.  It had no force in it, no life.  It was tired and dead.  She felt tired.  She wanted very much to run away and sleep.

     "Ten points from Gryffindor," he murmured, but his voice was flat, lacking its usual venom.  He studied her for a very long moment before he turned away and finished his lecture.

     Before it happened, things were going remarkably well for her.  The knife was cooperating, and Professor Snape had been strangely silent.  He still brooded and skulked and spent an inordinate amount of time eyeing her cauldron, but the requisite insults and jibes were distinctly lacking.  He seemed confused, almost subdued.

     It started as a burning tingle in her right ankle, sharp and hot like the unexpected jab of a syringe.  She clutched at it, scratching at the perpetually cold skin there in an effort to quell the sensation.  It only served to make things worse.  The stinging raced up her leg into the backs of her knees.

     _What is wrong with me?  _Her heart thudded in her ears, and her chest constricted.  The panic rushed up from one side, a solid wall of hot terror, clouding her reason, and from the other side came the relentless, biting sting that was now swallowing her entire lower half.  They met in the middle in soundless fusion, and the seeds of disaster planted upon her arrival blossomed into a vine of deadly simplicity.  The last of her good luck vanished.

     _Make it stop!  Oh, God, make it stop._  

     The stinging, pricking burn had swallowed her whole.  It bit into the soles of her feet and punctured her delicate scalp.  It was electric and hot and terrible, and she rubbed the palms of her hands all over her body in a desperate attempt to wash it away, but the fire continued to burn.  She was lost to the panic, flailing blindly at her invisible tormentor.  The pain was beneath the beds of her fingernails now, and she slashed them savagely across the desk to drive it out.  She did not hear the sharp snap as two of them tore to the quick.  All of her senses had gone numb; only touch was alive, and it was vengeful.

     Neville was staring at her in wide-eyed terror.  She tried to speak, to tell him to do something, but what came out of her mouth was, "The hornets!  The hor-hornets!"

     _Yes, it's the goddamn hornets._

     When she was three, she had crawled out to explore her grandfather's backyard, especially her favorite orange tree.  Her grandfather would sometimes lift her up to pluck a fat, ripe orange from the lower boughs.  She had crawled out to see if she could find something edible on the ground, one not too bruised or dirty.  What she had found was a hornet's nest that had been blown out of the tree.  She had put her hand in it reaching for a likely orange.

     The pain had been immediate and excruciating, living fire beneath her skin, and by the time her grandfather had come hobbling out to rescue her, she had been stung seventeen times.  The same pain had returned now, only it was a thousand times worse.  It was as though the ghosts of the insects her grandfather had burned alive along with their nest had come back and brought all their old malices with them.

     "Miss Stanhope, stop!"

     A voice, far away.  Even through the suffocating, deafening pain, she recognized Professor Snape's voice.  "Professor…help…me."  She shrieked as a nasty stab of agony sliced through the back of her neck.

     She looked up at him.  He was foggy, distorted in her oddly cataracted sight.  He was coming closer, his face brimming with authoritarian insolence.  Some part of her understood that this was bad, that it was dangerous for him to be near her now, and she tried to get away, leave him and the desk, but just as she was clawing for the stick, the liquid fire swallowed her arm, and she screamed, jerking her hand wildly to the right.  It struck something solid with a metallic _clong_.  There was a wet hissing splash, and then a shout.

     The pain disappeared.  It didn't fade slowly away.  It didn't linger, leaving a dull memory in her muscles and bones.  It was there, and then it wasn't.  She sat in her chair, her eyes closed and sweat cooling in a sticky mat on her forehead.  She felt ill, as though she had just emerged from the grips of a near-fatal fever.  She shook slightly.  Her throat was dry and her eyes throbbed.  

     The silence disturbed her.  It was too complete.  There was a single sound, an agonized hissing, as of someone fighting off excruciating pain.  Fear coiled in the back of her mind.  Her hand throbbed to remind her that she had struck something.  Then she remembered the wet, sizzling hiss, and she knew something terrible had happened.  When she opened her eyes, she instantly wished she hadn't.

     Professor Snape was in front of her, but he was not frightening or imposing now.  He was bent double, clutching both legs below the knee.  His robes were soaked, and beside him lay her empty cauldron, its empty mouth lolling witlessly at the blackboard.  The hissing was coming from him.  Between his white fingers, she could see puffy, swelling, red flesh.  Scalded flesh.

     Her hand flew to her mouth, and her nails dug into the tender flesh there, drawing blood.  A sound started in her throat, low and anguished.

     _I hurt him.  I hurt Professor Snape.  Look at what I've done to him!_

     The thought held no pride, no glee, only a sick, swooning misery.  She felt like throwing up.  She sobbed behind her hand, unable to believe what she was seeing and wishing she could take it all back.

     At the sound of her voice, Snape's head shot up, and behind the blinding anger she could see pain, dark and constant.  Another sob escaped her, and one thought crossed her mind.  _He's going to kill me._

     His hand shot out, and for a moment, she thought he was going to do just that.  Then it grabbed the collar of her robe and yanked, prompting an ominous purr from the seams.  He straightened, grimacing with the effort.  

     "You, Miss Stanhope, are coming with me."  His voice was barely a whisper, but she heard the fury in it all to clearly.  What was worse, she heard the pain, and it made her heart spasm with remorse.

     _I did this.  _I_ did this._

     "Miss Granger, supervise cleanup.  Class is dismissed," he hissed, stumbling as he tried to take a step forward.  He grabbed the back of her chair for support  

     "Yes, sir," came Granger's small, stunned reply.

     He leaned down, his lips grazing her ear.  "Now, Stanhope, get moving!  You are in a great deal of trouble."

     She knew that all too well.  Her racing heart told her so with every heartsick beat.  She didn't care.  For the first time in her life, she knew she deserved it.  Whatever Professor Snape did to her, it wouldn't be enough.  What she had done was unforgivable, and each time he shuffled behind her as she rolled to the door, clutching her push-handle for support, her heart broke a little more.

     In the confusion, no one saw Draco Malfoy slip his wand into his robes, a satisfied smile on his face.


	13. The Long Walk

Thanks to Chrisiant, who keeps me going.  A special thanks also goes to the Godawful Fanfiction Crew, especially Architeuthis.  Your recommendation is the highest compliment.

Rebecca's quote, "Here there be tygers," is from a Stephen King short story of the same name, found in the Skeleton Crew anthology.  All hail the King

Chapter Thirteen

     They made a pitiful sight hobbling down the corridor.  The only saving grace to the whole sorry affair was that the rest of the pupils were trapped within the snug confines of various classrooms and thus could not see their lurching, limping progress.  The only witnesses were the portraits that lined the walls.  Some gawked in open-mouthed surprise.  Others looked on in thin-lipped disapproval.  A few disappeared from their frames, hurrying to tell friends not fortunate enough to see the spectacle for themselves.  All of them stayed wisely silent.  They were keenly aware of Severus Snape's temper, and none of them wanted a set of unbecoming scorch marks for their ill-timed mirth..

     Rebecca saw nothing funny about the situation.  Absolutely nothing.  She felt weak, nauseated with the horror of what had happened.  Of what she had done.  And make no mistake, she _had _done it.  The reasons didn't matter, the circumstances didn't matter.  All that mattered was that she had done this terrible thing.  The red, scalded flesh of Professor Snape's legs told the only story that needed to be told.  

     She wept as she rolled, soundlessly, without even hitchings and snivelings to give her away.  The tears were warm and thick, like blood.  She made no attempt to wipe them away.  She let them trickle down her face and drip off the end of her quivering chin.  They belonged there.  They were markers of her sin.  They came ceaselessly, one after the other, and each one stung her eyes like the tearing bite of the knotted lash.  She welcomed the pain, both the physical and the emotional.  It meant that she could still feel, still care about someone other than herself.

     Until the remorse for what she had done had cut through the veil of numbness that had dropped over her the instant she opened her eyes, she had begun to suspect that she was losing her ability to feel, to empathize with the people around her.  From the day that Judith Pruitt had slit her own throat, she could feel it slipping away, drop by drop, heartbeat by heartbeat.  Things that had once made her throat constrict and her heart thud with empathy no longer moved her.  Tear-filled eyes no longer stirred compassion.  It was as though everything inside her had turned to ash and settling dust.  Then she had seen Professor Snape's grimacing face and his red, swollen legs, and the feeling she had presumed dead in her returned in a crushing avalanche.  Glory, glory hallelujah.

     So her compassion was not dead.  Life at D.A.I.M.S. had not squeezed the last drop of kindness from her gnarled bones.  That was sparse comfort.  Useless knowledge, too, because after this, there was no question that it was going to get another chance.  Her reprieve, her chance to escape from the cold clutches of its sterile white walls, was finished.  There would be no pardon for this, no forgiveness, no understanding.  Not even McGonagall, the patron saint of rationalization, would be able to excuse it.  And if she tried, she would spit in the woman's face.  Even she, desperate and miserable and humiliated, knew there was no justification.

     What happened to her didn't matter to her just then, not really.  The only thing she could see, the only thing the tunnel vision of her guilt would let her see, was what she had done.  She had hurt someone, caused them pain.  What she _was_ had injured another.  Her body had betrayed her, overthrowing the reins of her always-precarious control, and bringing pain and confusion in its wake.  It had exposed to the world and to her peers what she had always secretly known.  She was not in control.  She was a soul trapped inside a body that followed its own whims, heeded no will but its own.

     _You meant to do it._

The thought was so appalling that she nearly ground to halt, but then she remembered that Professor Snape was using her push-handles for support.  If she stopped suddenly, he would bump into her battery case and hurt himself still more.  No, _she _would hurt him more.  So she kept going, her clammy hand jittering on the joystick as she willed herself to keep the chair straight.

     _I did not._

_     Oh, yes, you did.  You meant it.  Don't you remember?_

_     What are you talking about?_

     Then she did remember.  It came back to her with dizzying clarity.  The first night of detention, as he was walking her back to Gryffindor Tower, deliberately leaving her behind in the darkness, she had wished him ill.  She had wanted him to suffer, to know pain and impotent rage.  She had been ashamed afterwards, but the feeling had been there all the same, as fleeting and seductive as slipping her hand between the bedsheets in the breathy silence while everyone else slept.  

     _Oh, Jesus, you know I didn't mean that.  I didn't._

_     If you feel something, you mean it, even if you only mean it for five seconds.  You know that._

_     I only thought that because I was angry._

_     And that same anger made you push that cauldron onto him._

_     No!_

It was true that over the years, in the darkest corner of her mind where the ugliest resentments festered, she had often dreamed of watching the guileless, stupid walkers that stared as they passed the windows of the "'tard" school as they were struck down by a vengeful God finally awakened to the feeble cries of His weakest children.  She had dreamed of seeing their perfect bodies bending and contorting as the burdens of the victims were foisted upon the shoulders of the tormentors.  She imagined what it would feel like when that weight left her, imagined the cessation of cramps, the lightness of her breath as she breathed in the way of the whole, unthinkingly, unfettered.  

     Sometimes, in her darkest dreams, she imagined that it was she who shifted the balance, she who meted out justice.  She saw herself reaching out her righteous hands, instruments of the Almighty's divine retribution, and passing her afflictions on to them like deadly contagion.  She saw their bodies twist and wither while hers blossomed and grew strong.  She saw all these things, and in her dreams, she smiled.  

     But they were only dreams.  Nothing more.  She would never act upon them, not even under pain of death.  To believe in dreams too strongly, to cling to them too tightly, was dangerous.  She understood her dreams to be unhealthy, dreams born of fever and of unthinking, reflexive hatred.  She recognized them as cankerous poison, and she fought to excise them from her spirit.  She would never give in to them.  Never.

     _For Snape you would._

_     No.  I wouldn't._

_     Yes, you would.  He pushes you harder than anyone else ever has, and you hate him for it._

_     No, I don't.  Not anymore._

_     Yes, you do.  You hate him because he walks.  That's all the reason you need._

_     That isn't true._

_     Isn't it?  Why didn't you move away from him?_

_     I tried-_

_     You could have moved away the moment you felt the strange sensation.  You chose to remain where you were.  You stayed because you knew what would happen._

_     NO!_

_     How do you know?  How can you be sure?_

_     Because I know who I am.  I know _what_ I am.  I may hate, and I may dream of things better left undreamt, but I am not yet so cold or so dead as to harm another.  No matter what you think.  There's a world of difference between dreaming and doing, and I swear upon my life that I will _NEVER _cross that line._

_     That's a promise you can't keep, little girl.  _Her grandfather's voice.  _Sooner or later, before it's all over, you will spill blood._

_     What?  What are you talking about?_

     His voice fell silent, and before she could ask him again, Professor Snape spoke.

     "Stop, Miss Stanhope."

     She stopped, and from behind her came the sound of him leaning heavily against the wall.  Though he tried to suppress it, she heard a muffled groan.  The sound cut her already stricken heart like a razor.

     _Oh, God, what have I done?_

     When she thought it was safe, she slowly pivoted the chair around, bringing it to a stop against the cool stone wall.  She let her head rest against it.  Maybe the cold air would soothe her fevered mind, numb the incredulous horror that seized her system with shock.  From where she sat, she could see far too much, but she did not turn away.  She faced the consequences with red, weeping eyes.

     He was leaning heavily against the wall, his eyes closed against a stab of pain.  His wet robe clung to his legs like a mutinous second skin.  His lily hands rested on his knees, bunching the fabric between his long fingers.  Through the gap between the hem and the top of his exotic leather boots, she could see a flash of angry red skin that was already beginning to pucker and bubble.  She swallowed a dry lump.  Oh, Christ.

     She knew where they were going.  She had traveled the route before.  Professor Snape was her regular escort, as a matter of fact.  They were going to the Headmaster's office, and when they got there, things were going to be very bad indeed.  She was, she knew, going there for the last time.  If they made it that far.  At the present, Professor Snape looked in no shape to go anywhere.

     "Sir, perhaps you should go to the Hospital Wing."  Her voice was unsteady and thick.

     _Oh, brilliant, Bec.  He can't make it to the Headmaster's, but you advise him to go to the Hospital Wing, which is just as far.  Outstanding._

What else was there?  He couldn't go on like this.  The pain was clearly well-nigh unbearable.  She had never seen him move so slowly, so hesitantly.  His usual grace was shattered, lost among the seared skin and quivering, insulted muscles.  _She_ couldn't go on this way.  Watching him was painful.  It was all she could do not to reach out her hand and touch him, to try and comfort.  She didn't dare do it; she knew the consequences too well, but the temptation, the need, was still there.

     _Ah, the truth comes out.  _You _don't want to see him like that anymore.  Always so selfish.  Thinking of yourself and not him._

_     All mercy is selfish at its heart.  You know that.  The people who give it are looking for absolution of one kind or another.  I am.  There's nothing altruistic about guilt._

     It was a bitter thought, but not entirely true.  It wasn't just for her own benefit that she wanted him to go to Madam Pomfrey.  She was bitter, cold, sometimes savage in her unspoken indictments of those around her, but she was not intentionally cruel.  She would never knowingly inflict pain upon anyone.  Pain was the one thing she understood perfectly and feared.  She knew its potential, its efficiency as a tool of vengeance, of hatred, and she had sworn never to use it as such.

     No matter what the unflinching, merciless voice in her head told her, no matter what the pale, insinuating voice of her long-tormented conscience whispered inside her head, she knew that her need for Professor Snape to be seen to was more than just a sinner's uneasy cry for pity.  She hated seeing the change she had wrought in him with a single uncontrolled jerk of her arm.  He was her bane, but he was a _beautiful_ bane.  Even as she had wished him pain and misfortune in a thousand different guises, she had admired his sleek, sensual, incongruous grace.  People with greasy hair and sallow skin weren't supposed to inspire aesthetic appreciation, and yet he did.  And she had ruined that, stripped it away like a careless carpenter hacking fine varnish from the remains of a priceless antique table.  She had peeled away his veneer and left shabbiness in her wake, and if they didn't get moving soon, everyone was going to know it.  

     His eyes flew open and he stared at her in savage fury, his lip curling in disgust.  He gripped his wand convulsively, as though he longed to bring the smooth wooden tip to her throat and release a Killing Curse.  "One more word out of you, Stanhope, and _you_ will have a very nasty accident."  He spoke softly, calmly, but his words carried the terrible weight of absolute surety.  After a moment, he pushed away from the wall and staggered forward.  "Move on," he hissed, gripping the handles once more.

     "Sir, please, can't we go to the infirmary?"  She had to try again.  The suffering was too awful too see, made worse by the fact that he was trying to hide it.

     "Silence!"  No further argument would be tolerated.

     Incredibly, she felt her mouth opening again.  "Please, sir, you need help!  Please!"

     _You have a death wish, child._

The tears came faster, inflaming her raw cheeks.  Her emotional control was slipping.  She could feel the hitherto unmoveable bedrock of the fortress she had built brick by brick from the terrors and doubts of her past shift.  She could almost hear it, furtive, chuckling, the grinding of huge psychological tectonic plates as they passed on a dangerous fault line.  She gripped the armrests of her chair, trying to hold on to herself amid the inner turmoil.

     She set her teeth against a shuddering gasp.  "Please, sir!  Please!  Go see Madam Pomfrey."  Tears, real tears of fear and frustration, welled in her eyes and spilled over.  She wasn't going to move until he agreed to go to the Hospital Wing.

     "I will ask you just once more to get moving, Miss Stanhope."

     She sat obdurately in the corridor, head bowed, looking every inch the obstinate mule he would accuse her of being so often through the years.  She was well aware that she was inviting the wrath of the gods with her refusal to yield, in particular the ire of daemon fantastique standing behind her, but she had chosen her course, and she would hold it until the last.

     In a barely audible voice she said, "Please, sir, please go to the infirmary to get treated.  I've nowhere to hide."

     She heard the creak as he leaned down.  Then his breath, hot and smelling of gourmet cheese, tickled her cheek.  "Your protestations of concern for my well-being will change nothing.  You will be expelled."

     _Hard as a stone, child.  Hard as a stone._

     She twisted her head to look at him as best she could.  "I don't give a damn about that!  Do whatever you want with me afterwards, but first get help.  Sir," she added, a hasty afterthought.

     He gave her an unpleasant smile.  "Sixty points for insubordination.  Can't bear to see what you've done?"

     "No," she croaked.  "I can't."

     "Why ever not?  I should think you would be dancing in the streets of Hogsmeade at my misfortune."

     She blinked at him.  "You think I meant for that to happen?  Sir, in spite of what you think, I would never deliberately harm you.  Never."

     "Of course not.  You're a Gryffindor.  Gryffindors don't sin."  The impact of the last retort was undermined by a grunt of pain when he shifted his weight.

     She turned to face him, moving slowly so that he could find new handholds.  "Sir, please.  If you were to fall on the rotating stairs, I would never be able to-,"

     "To what?" he spat.  "Give me the proper shove?"

     The anger and bitterness in his voice and swirling beneath his skin were like a slap, and she recoiled, her mouth opening in surprise.  The urge to seize him and shake from his soul the poison that colored his vision deep, pestilential black rose up again, and she had to coil her wrists around the cheap vinyl of her armrests to keep them from flying to his face.

     "Oh, sir," she managed.

     The foundations of her emotional stronghold shifted again, but this was not a gentle shift.  It was a cataclysmic buckling.  Fissures formed where once impregnable, flawless walls had stood.  There was a thunderous crack as the center column, the one that cemented everything together, exploded.  It swayed precariously for a few seconds, tenacious to the end, and then toppled, spraying everything with its lethally sharp fragments, gouging even more grievous breaches into the rapidly crumbling walls.

     In the dwindling moments before the roof came down, a single coherent thought anchored itself in the shambles of her mind.  _He broke me.  It wasn't the way he wanted it, but the bastard broke me._

     "Wha-oh, sir!"  

     She folded in on herself, tucking her arms close to her abdomen.  She wanted to have a bit of room should she need to retch.  As it was, her curtain of blonde hair was grazing his midsection, hissing softly against the black fabric.  The smell of him invaded her burning nostrils, and it was a welcome invasion.  She clung to the calm, _rational_ smell as though it were a life preserver.  She felt mad, as if she'd suddenly gone insane.  It was mental vertigo, and she groped in the darkness for some center, any center.  There was only the smell, and she held on to it with all her strength.

     She had stopped.  At the very last instant, she had stopped.  She had very nearly asked the question that was on the tip of her tongue, but even in the grips of this strange madness, she could not bring herself to pose it.  She knew intuitively that he would not understand it, would search with all his power for some terrible hidden meaning, for the pulverized shards of weaponry that a question like that must surely conceal.  He would seize it and turn it against her because that was all he knew.

     _What have they done to you?_  That was the question that had nearly slipped past her tongue.  She bit down on it until the copper tang of blood filled her mouth.  She was teetering on the thin edge of hysteria.  She was feeling too much, too fast.  She hugged herself tightly, cowering from the barrage of feeling her newly razed defenses let in.  It was like being struck with a heavy mallet, and she coughed on a groan.

     All those years and all that time crafting the thick barriers to keep people out, and she had never suspected the devastating erosive power of compassion.  Or maybe she had.  Maybe that was why she had tried so hard to shut it out.  After her best friend had been stolen in a long and helpless torment, and after she had seen Judith Pruitt's bloody, lifeless corpse being wheeled down the front ramp of D.A.I.M.S., she had quietly pulled the plug on it, shoving it as far back into the vault as she could, leaving it there in the hopes that the cobwebs and dust would cover it forever.  After those things, it had simply proven too costly.

     Now the most unlikely person imaginable had resurrected it, had thrown the battered and warped steel door that had imprisoned it for so long wide open.  Professor Snape, the bastard she had alternately hated, feared, and respected.  Its long hibernation had not affected its potency, and she gagged on it, fighting it.  She made a passing attempt at grabbing it and stuffing it back from whence it came, but it was useless.  The beast was loose, its cage overthrown.

     _This was the choice you made when you chose to count yourself with the group again._

_     I didn't want this.  I only wanted friends._

_     Ah, but this was part of the price.  Everything has two sides.  If you accept one, then you must take the other.  No getting around it._

She felt very heavy, and when Professor Snape called her name, she stayed where she was.  She couldn't sit up.  It was too much of an effort.  She would just sit here and wait until the numbing shock wore off and the world made anesthetized sense again.

     "Miss Stanhope."  Louder, sharper.

     "Yes, sir?" she mumbled from between her knees.

     "Sit up.  Now."

     She sat up slowly.  She was sorry to do it.  His rich smell left her, and without it, her last anchor disappeared.  She swallowed heavily.

     "Are you finished?"

     She nodded weakly.

     "Then let us continue."  His eyes narrowed.  "Have you hurt yourself?"  He lifted a hand from her armrest and brushed his fingers across her mouth.  He scowled when she flinched, inspected his fingers, and scowled again.  "What happened?"

     "I don't know, sir."  It was true.  Everything after the sight of him clutching his knees was a foggy blur.

     "Open your mouth."

     She did as she was told, and he peered inside.  He gave no sign as to what he saw, but after a moment, he slowly moved his hand into his robes.  When he brought it out again, he was holding a handkerchief.

     "Wipe your face.  You're a mess.  I'll not have you before the Headmaster looking like that."  He held it out to her.

     She took it and swiped and dabbed at her face, grimacing as the fine cloth touched broken skin.  She probably did look frightful.  She _felt _damaged beyond repair, as if her body had been rearranged without her consent.  Even the simple act of wiping her face had taken on Herculean proportions.  When she was finished, she stared at the handkerchief as though it were something she had never seen before.  She squinted, letting the synapses carry scrambled, logy messages through the morass of jumbled emotions that her brain had become.

     "Would you like it back?" she said slowly, peering up at him through red, scoured eyes.

     He snorted and plucked the crumpled cloth from her grasp, holding it gingerly so as not to soil his fingers.  He put it away without looking at it.  He eyed her face for a moment, his lips pursed into a moue of disapproval.  "Not much of an improvement, but it will have to suffice," he muttered.  "Get moving."

     She turned slowly, letting him get behind her and readjust his grip on the handholds.  When she felt his insistent push, she started forward, the chair whirring mournfully as they went.  Her hand shook as she drove, seized by a numb ague.  She could see her fingers clutching the joystick, but she couldn't feel them.  It was like they belonged to someone else, and she was only a passing observer.

     Inch by inch, they were drawing closer to inexorable justice.  Maybe it was better this way.  She was tired.  She was beaten, and she was smart enough to know it.  This wasn't the movies.  There was not going to be a last second reprieve.  Mercy was not going to rain down from above.  No hero was going to burst in with proof of her innocence, and she found that she didn't want them to.  In real life, there were consequences, and if any decency still lived and breathed in her, she would meet them with as much dignity and grace as she could muster.  She could do that, at least.

     She was a failed experiment, and knowing that, the pressure she had been struggling under for weeks left her, bursting like a rancid pustule.  She no longer had to worry about failing to meet the lofty expectations of starry-eyed disabled Wizard advocates who had hailed her as a brave pioneer who would change the face of magical society by her mere presence in this venerated institution.  She could go home and resume her mundane life, live and die as nothing more than what she was-a normal human being just trying to make it along the bumpy, snarled thread of her life.

     She was disappointed, but any regret she felt was swamped by the feeling of shamed relief.  Hogwarts was a wonderful place, and she would miss it.  She would miss its stately stone walls and grand, sweeping turrets.  She would miss the teachers, who had challenged her more than she had ever dreamed possible.  She would be sorry to leave the friends she had made here, and it would pain her to tell Winky, her wrinkled little mother hen, that she was leaving.  But in spite of all of those regrets, she could not deny a lightening of her burden.

     The integration of disabled wizards into mainstream schools and society would be hampered, of course, set back by as much as a decade, but she was far from concerned about that.  It wasn't her problem.  Self-preservation was her problem, and if that meant leaving the best opportunity she had ever had, then so be it.  D.A.I.M.S. had made her a survivalist, and a scant month outside its sphere of influence wasn't going to change that.

     D.A.I.M.S.  For all its faults, she was beginning to see that it had its benefits.  It might have worn you down and drained you of your zest for life, but it also offered a blessed numbness, a welcome insulation from the burden of emotion.  You never felt what it was doing to you, what it was stealing.  You floated in a blissful, narcotized haze, and one day you awoke to find that it was all over.  You went from eleven to one hundred and twenty in the blink of an eye, and by the time you thought to ask what had happened to the rest of your life, they were lowering you into the cool embrace of the earth.  It would be nice to sink into that liquid nitrogen numbness.

     _The selfishness returns._

_     The selfishness never left.  It's always been there, sleeping inside every human being. _

_     I never figured you for a quitter._

_     I'm not a quitter.  I'm a realist._

_    Oh, is that what they're calling it now when someone turns tail and runs when things get hard?_

_     It's not like that.  There's nothing I can do.  Nothing I can say will convince him that I didn't mean to do it._

_     So you're not even going to try?_

_     No.  I know an exercise in futility when I see it._

_     Whatever happened to the fire in your belly, the one that made you tell me to shove it up my arse when I tried to make you eat au gratin potatoes?_

_     I hate to break it to you, Grandpa, but those flames flickered and died a long time ago.  It's hard to stoke them when nothing ever comes of your anger._

_     Why does this bother you so much, girl?  You've had accidents before._

_     Yes, I have.  I've pissed on the floor.  I've started my period in white pants.  I've dropped plates of food on the floor.  Those were accidents.  This goes beyond accident.  This time I've hurt someone, hurt them badly.  I never wanted to do that.  I wanted to get through life without screwing it up.  And I screwed it up big time._

_     He'll live._

_     That's not the point.  It should never have happened._

_     Well, it did.  What are you going to do about it?_

_     I don't know.  It's out of my hands._

_     You keep saying that.  It's never out of your hands._

_     What would you have me do?  Obliviate him?_

_     No.  Explain to him._

_     There's nothing to explain.  I fucked up.  End of story._

_     You've seen suffering before, pain and grief in excess of anything happening now.  Why shed tears for this?_

_     Because it's mine!  I did this.  Me.  This is the work of my hands.  His pain is different because it shouldn't be.  It's unnatural.  _

_     As opposed to yours?_

_     I was born into mine.  It is an accepted part of who I am.  I've never known otherwise.  It fits me well, ugly as it may be.  I've learned how to cope.  People like him don't wear pain well.  They fight it.  You've seen him.  You know._

     The internal argument might have gone on indefinitely had not Professor Snape spoken.  "Turn left."  Just those two words.

     She opened her mouth to say that left led to the infirmary, then closed it again.  He was well aware of that fact, and why in the world was she looking a gift horse in the mouth?  She pivoted cautiously, praying that she wouldn't graze his legs and wincing when she heard his ragged breathing, tight with pain.  She almost wished he would cry out, find release for the discomfort.  His heroic silence was as difficult to watch as the evidence of his injury.  But he only hissed and hobbled forward.

     She was ashamed to admit it, but even as she was writhing in mortified torment at what she had done, she drew comfort from his presence.  The smell of him was thick around her face, and though it drove more tears from her raw eyes, it calmed her, too.  It had not changed; it was as steady and stalwart as ever it had been.  _This will be but a passing thing,_ it said, and she believed it and was glad.  It didn't matter that she wouldn't be here to see that promise fulfilled.

     They made it to the Hospital Wing after a grueling thirty minutes.  Ten paces from the door, it was a very near thing.  He let out a sharp bark of pain and stumbled, his chest smacking against the back of her head.  It was remarkably solid beneath the heavy cloth of his robes, and she hiccoughed in surprise.  She had expected him to be far more ethereal, willowy, like dreams and dust.  He certainly moved that way.

     After that nonsensical thought came another, more practical one.  _Oh, no.  If he falls out here, I'll never be able to get him up.  _

     _Go get Pomfrey if it comes to it._

_     I can't just leave him lying here._

_     He would hardly appreciate if you let his pain continue because you were too vain to call for help, _her mind pointed out.

     _No, I guess he wouldn't.  Pomfrey it is._

     Thankfully, the race for help never came to pass.  After a moment he recovered, renewing his grip on her push handles and heaving himself upright again.  He stood for a while, panting from the exertion, and then he tapped her lightly on the shoulder.  He wanted her to go on.

     She moved as quickly as she dared, her heart hammering in her throat.  Though he had moved away from her, the weight of his chest still pressed against the back of her scalp, imprinted there in the indelible ink of tactile memory.  She wanted to brush her fingers against it, swab it away, _out, out damn spot, _but she dared not raise her hand.  She just kept going.  The sterility of the infirmary couldn't come fast enough.

     The smell hit her the instant she crossed the threshold.  It was overpowering, driving away the soothing smell of him.  The stinging, pungent stink of hospital.  It burned into her nostrils like acid, and she turned her head away.  There were other, lighter smells, too, lemongrass and lilac, but they couldn't cover up the reek of artificial cleanliness.

     Underneath those scents lurked another, truer smell.  Her nose picked it from the air with the ease of long acquaintance.  It was the sickly stench of corruption, of old death.  It clung to the walls and floors in an invisible miasma.  No amount of scrubbing or scouring would ever get it out.  It had permeated the stone, insinuated itself into the viscera of the rock like a parasite.  It was a part of it now.  Death never gave up its place.

     After her best friend died, the bed in which he had lain and died, the bed that had eaten him, always smelled of rot and disease.  The school laundry had washed the linens a thousand times, but the odor never went away.  It stuck to everything, even the curtains above his headboard had stunk of it.  She smelled it in the cool, white metal.  Eventually, the bed and all its linens were taken out and burned.  For sanitary reasons, the head nurse had said, but she knew the truth.  The nurse had been afraid of that bed, too.  She always gave it a wide berth when she passed it, and her eyes always drifted uneasily to it when she worked in the evening.  She knew about the bed.  That's why she had it thrown out.

     A thousand years of death blanketed these floors.  A thousand years of loss, of blood, of all the things that came with the business of leaving this world.  The smell would always be there.  It would speak to what this place had been long after the plaque on the wall had rusted and tarnished to nothing, long after the surrounding walls and foundations had returned to dust.  Nothing would ever grow in the soil beneath these floors.

     _Maybe that's why the bed came here._

     Her head jerked to the place where the deathbed sat, separated from the others by three feet and a thousand miles.  It looked innocent now, serene, but that was because Death was not here.  It was waiting.  For a moment, it seemed to her that the sheets rippled, _grinned,_ and then they were just bedclothes again.

     It wasn't the same bed, certainly, but it _looked _the same.  Right down to the scratch on the foot of the bed, made when she had clipped it during the last days of her friend's life.  If she rolled to it now, would she find the same glitter blue paint that had graced her chair at the time?  She thought she might.  

     "Here there be tygers," she said faintly.

     "What?"

     Snape, who had collapsed onto the nearest bed as soon as it was within range, looked at Rebecca sharply.  He hadn't caught what she'd said, but she was sitting there with the oddest expression on her face.  Her eyes were far away, glassy and distant.  She was staring at the bed tucked into the furthest corner of the room, riveted to it with unsettling concentration.  

     _It's almost as if she expects it to move._

     That was ridiculous.  Beds did not move, and if Miss Stanhope thought they did, then she was in need of far more help than he could offer.  In spite of his question, she hadn't moved, hadn't even turned her head.  It was as though she hadn't heard him at all.  She was still staring at that bed.  In fact, she looked a bit mad, and he felt a grudging pang of worry.  Had the incident upset her that much?

     _It bloody well should have, _he thought angrily.

     It had certainly upset him.  Upset wasn't the proper word.  Anger didn't even begin to encompass what he felt.  Neither did fury.  They both fell well short of the mark.  He didn't think there was a word in any tongue to describe what he felt.  It was enormous, so enormous that it could not fit under the scope of his vision.  It blurred around the edges, and the fact that he could not articulate what he felt frustrated him still further.  Words were his second passion, and he was as deft with them as he was with the cutting knife, the cauldron, and the alembic.  That he could not bend them to his will now when he most desired it was the final indignity on this horrific day.

     There was anger yes, anger white and seething.  He was not surprised at this.  He had expected it.  It was a state and a feeling as natural to him as the skin on the palms of his hands.  But there were other things, too, feelings he had not anticipated, for which he had not prepared.  Chief among them was disappointment.  He could not account for it, but it was there, nested in the midst of his anger like a fragile egg.

     He had begun to believe in her.  Against his will, even as he had plotted her dismissal and reveled in the acts of cruelty his position as instructor afford, he had begun to be intrigued, even a little amazed.  She had never quit.  Never.  No matter how late he kept her, no matter how hard he pushed, she had never whinged, never begged off.  She had worked until he said stop.  She would work until she dropped, he suspected, and more than once he had been tempted to test the notion.  It was "Yes, sir," and "No, sir," all night long.  And if he kept her past the appointed time set by the Headmaster, she never so much as blinked.  And now this.

     _Dammit.  _

_     You never should have believed, especially not in her.  You knew better._

     Yes, he had, but it had been so tempting.  He had sensed something in her that he had not seen in the others, except perhaps in Draco.  A certain awareness, a calculating view of the world that he found disturbing and strangely exhilarating at the same time.  She was bent and twisted, but she understood the way of things very well, was on more than nodding acquaintance with the harsh reality lurking outside these cocooning walls.  She was pragmatic.

     She had respected him, too.  She had given him his proper due and made no secret of the fact that she understood her place.  She acknowledged him as the supreme ruler of his classroom and the subject he taught.  He was under no illusion that she _liked_ the situation.  He knew that she didn't, but whether she approved of the way things were on not was wholly irrelevant.  What was relevant was her conduct, and until now, it had been flawless.

     He still wasn't sure what had happened.  A sudden motion had caught he eye, and when he had turned, he had seen her clutching and flailing.  Though he had remained outwardly unflustered, his heart had skipped a beat, and the thought had crossed his mind that maybe she was having one of those seizures and McGonagall was always fretting about.  Visions of her choking on her own tongue had danced in his head, and he searched frantically for the proper way to handle it.  Then he had caught a glimpse of her face, and the specter of a fatal fit vanished.  Her eyes were wide and agonized, but not vacant.  She had been there for whatever was happening to her.

     He had taken two steps forward, his voice cracking across the frozen classroom, telling her to stop.  He had seen her hand scrabble for the stick, and then something, a huge bolt of pain, had ripped it away.  In the next instant, his legs had been bathed in boiling potion, and pain had swallowed everything.  

     The pain was alive and ravenous, clawing up his legs and burrowing behind his knees.  It had eased momentarily when he sat down, but it was healthy and thriving now.  He was nauseated with it.  He swallowed his gorge.  He could feel the flesh puckering beneath his robes.  Where was Pomfrey?  Ordinarily, she never left the Hospital Wing.

     _Maybe she's hiding from you._

The thought nettled him.  He was her most frequent and worst-mannered patient.  By the end of a session with him, she was as ill-tempered as he was.  It was no small feat to sour the disposition of the normally placid Mediwitch.

     _I can't help it if I'm a discerning patient,_ he thought peevishly.

     _You're a right prat when you're ill, Severus._

     He couldn't help it.  He was independent, strong-willed as the four winds.  He was accustomed to doing things for himself, being master of his own destiny, and lying helpless in a bed certainly did nothing to further that image.  It drove him mad, being at the mercy of the will of others.  Twenty-four hours was enough to have him climbing the walls.  He couldn't see how Stanhope could stand it.  He would have slit his own throat by now.

     She was still staring at the bed in the far corner in vacant horror.  Her left hand opened and closed dreamily in a loose fist, and the right swiped compulsively across her bloody lips.  It frightened him to see her that way.

     "Stanhope," he barked, "answer me at once."

     She jerked so hard that he thought she was going to come out of her chair.  Her had swung to him, and he saw her eyes clear of that terrifying nothingness.  Wherever she had been, she was back now.

     "Forgive me, sir.  I didn't hear you."

     "Obviously," he snapped.  "What did you just say?"

     Her brow furrowed in confusion.  "Did I say something, sir?  I don't recall."

     He snorted.  He wasn't surprised.  He barely recalled the long trip here.  "Satisfied with your handiwork, Miss Stanhope?"

     Her face clouded and crumpled.  "No, sir," she said thickly, "I'm not."

     He saw that she was weeping again.  The tears never seemed to stop.  They came from an apparently inexhaustible source.  Her eyes and cheeks had been scourged by them; the flesh was bright red, chapped.  The salt in them must have made her skin scream, but she wept without sound.  Inhale.  Soft, sighing exhale.  The mournful patter of falling tears.

     The tears infuriated him.  She had hurt him, and she had the nerve to weep.  She wasn't the one suffering the agony of burnt flesh.  What reason did she have to weep?  Did she think that the tiny, sparkling drops of regret would move him to compassion?  She had hurt him.  Worse yet, she had disappointed him.  For that, she had to pay.

     "No?  Sorry you missed my face?"

     The sound that came out of her was indescribable.  It was low and wounded.  It came from the deepest part of her.  She pressed her teeth together, and the sound passed her lips in a choking whine.  It was the sound of something dying, something shattering.  Her chest spasmed, and her thin hands gouged deep scratches into the vinyl of her armrests.  She was fighting hard to suppress the sound, struggling valiantly.  Her head shook.

     "No, sir," she managed in a strangled croak.  The sound faded.

     Even as he felt a stab of satisfaction for the hurt he had inflicted, a kernel of shame lodged in his heart.  She was fighting so hard to preserve her dignity, still treating him with respect in the face of imminent expulsion.

     _Maybe she thinks it will win her clemency._

     Well, it wouldn't, but the struggle was something to behold.  He was strangely moved by it.  Even in the face of his fury, his cruelty, and her own simmering shame, she had not resorted to sniveling.  She was behaving with as much dignity as she could muster under the circumstances, something grown adults often failed to do.  He was beginning to suspect she possessed a steel spine.

     Annoyed by his unwilling admiration, he snapped, "Where in the blazes is Pomfrey?"

     "Madam Pomfrey, goddammit!"  Rebecca shouted at the top of her voice.

     He gaped at her.  "Thirty points for insolence," he murmured, momentarily stunned by the sound of quiet Rebecca Stanhope cursing loudly at an adult.

     Madam Pomfrey appeared, her face a mask of disapproval.  It deepened when she saw Rebecca.

     "There is no need for such language, Miss Stanhope, and I'll not have it.  Points ought to be deducted."

     "I quite agree," he said drily.

     Madam Pomfrey's eyes widened when she saw him.  "Good heavens, Professor Snape!  What happened?"

     "It was all my fault," Rebecca said quietly.  "I knocked a boiling cauldron onto his legs."

     "I didn't ask you, Miss Stanhope," she retorted waspishly, bustling over to inspect the damage.

     "Be that as it may, she is entirely correct," he said calmly.

     Pomfrey lifted up the hem of his robes and grimaced.  "It's quite bad, but luckily for you, I've just the thing.  Good thing you restocked our Potions stores a few days ago."  To Stanhope, she said,  "Well, what are you standing about for?  Out with you.  There's nothing you can do here."

     Pomfrey hurried off to get the Incendi-Soothe from her storage cupboard.  Stanhope remained where she was.  He noticed the mask had been slipped on.  The tears were gone, only the red blotches to give away that they had ever been there.  The opaque windows had drawn down over her eyes again.  There was neither pain nor fear in them now.  She had distanced herself, closed herself off.  She was a mere observer.

     He realized that he had seen her, the real her.  The shock of what she had done had torn it off, or perhaps now that the game was up, she had simply chosen to take it off, to offer him a shot at the exposed flesh.  Her penance.  She had let him see, and now she was waiting for his judgment, Pomfrey be damned.

     _She doesn't have to see.  Why does she stay?_

_     Because this is part of it, and she knows it.  She's going to see it through, no matter how ugly it is._

_     Damned Gryffindor honor._

_     She's damned either way.  If she flees, you curse her as coward.  If she stays, it's mawkish Gryffindor honor.  She can't win._

_     Bugger off._

_     It's respect, Severus.  She owes you that much, and she's going to give it to you, one way or another._

Madam Pomfrey returned with the jar of Incendi-Soothe and stopped short when she saw Rebecca still sitting there.

     "I thought I told you to be off," she said shortly.

     "Yes, ma'am, you did," Rebecca answered, but her eyes were still on him.  Watching.

     _She's waiting for me to tell her to go or stay.  As far as she's concerned Madam Pomfrey is in another universe.  My word is the only thing that matters._

     Slowly, deliberately, he said, "I want her to stay here, see the consequences of what she's done."

     It was true.  He did want her to see, to squirm on the pike a bit longer before he brought the killing blow down, but he also wanted to study her, to pry at her inner workings.  He needed to be sure of what he had seen.

     Pomfrey sniffed, but he hardly heard her.  He was the professor, and she was the nurse, and that was that.  If she didn't like it, she could take it up with Albus.  Something might get done if he stopped plying her with sherbet lemons long enough, but his petulance was legendary, and more likely, it would be waved off.  

     The pain vanished as soon as the gel made contact with his skin, and he let out a slow, relieved breath.  He saw Pomfrey smile smugly.

     "What?"

     "Feeling better?"

     "A piranha attached to my genitals would be an improvement after what I've endured," he spat.

     There was a surprised huff from Pomfrey, and from Rebecca's corner came something that sounded suspiciously like a snort of laughter.  When he looked, her face was composed, but there was a telltale twitch in her jaw.

     "I see no need for such coarseness," Pomfrey protested.

     "Don't you?  I've nearly had my legs burnt off by a grossly incompetent student.  I think I'm entitled to a bit of grievance.  Now, if you'll excuse us, I'd like to discuss matters with Miss Stanhope.  Privately."

     "This is my infirmary.  You can't just-,"

     "Indeed it is.  As no one else is here, this will do nicely."  He glowered at her.

     She set her jaw.  "As you wish, Professor Snape.  You should be fine.  If you'd like, I can give you a cane."

     "I'd rather crawl."

     She nodded tersely.  I'll be in the next room if you need me."  She left, muttering something that sounded perilously close to "insufferable prat."

     As soon as she was gone, he put a Silencing Charm on the room.  Then he turned to face Rebecca Stanhope.  They looked at each other for a very long time, neither one of them saying a word.  She was watching him somberly, gravely.  She was utterly still.

     "Well, Miss Stanhope, what shall we do with you?" he asked quietly.

     She ran her fingers through her hair and said the last thing he expected.  "You need to send me home, sir."

     He had anticipated whinging, unseemly begging, empty promises, defensive explanations.  The baldness of her statement took him aback.

     "What?" he asked stupidly.

     "What other course of action is there?  I deserve nothing less.  Oh, Christ, look at what I did to you, sir!"  She leaned forward and buried her face in her hands.

     The mask shattered into a thousand pieces.  Her heard it splinter behind her hands.  That low, wretched noise was coming from the pit of her stomach.  Her shoulders shook, and she rocked back and forth in an unconscious motion.

     _She's weeping.  Merlin.  She's not crying.  She's weeping.  For me._

     _Looks like you've got what you wanted.  You've broken her._

     He had, but it was a hollow victory.  There was no satisfaction in it, only a sick feeling of loss.  He had admired her stoicism, and to see it washed so completely away was like seeing a great monument toppled.  Now that it was gone, he wished for it again.

     He sat in stupefied silence, watching as she wept.  Never in all his years of teaching had a student shown remorse for what they'd done to him or said of him.  It was a badge of honor to injure him and those who defied him were eyed with quiet respect.  Potter was revered for his disdain of him.  If Potter had been the one to do this, he and his friends would have been capering in the aisles.  Now, a student, a Gryffindor, was weeping before him.

     _Leave it to Stanhope to make things difficult._

"Stop your blubbering, girl."  He pulled out his soiled handkerchief and held it out to her.

     She raised her head, treating him to a glimpse of her tear and mucus-stained face.  She sat up and rolled to where he sat on the bed, hand outstretched.

     "Thank you, sir," she mumbled, and went about cleaning her face for the second time.

     "Tell me what happened," he said when she finished.

     She took a watery breath.  "I don't know, sir.  I was going about my work, and my legs started to sting.  I tried scratching, but it only got worse.  It was like a thousand hornets.  It was terrible pain.  Then I saw you, heard you.  I tried to back away, but my arm was on fire.  It was like something was holding it.  I couldn't.  I wanted to.  I couldn't."  She was on the verge of dissolving again.

     "I see."  An image formed in his mind.  Her hand reaching desperately for that control stick, straining for it.  "Like hornets, did you say?"

     "Yes, sir."

     The wheels of his mind were turning.  He was beginning to understand.  A Curse, one she had fought as best she could to get away from him.  But who could have done it?  Then he knew.  Malfoy.  The little bastard would do something like this, and he had reason to.  He had extracted his pound of flesh, but unfortunately, he had taken it from the wrong person.  He would deal with him later.  Slytherin to Slytherin. 

     _What about her?  _

His first impulse was to bring down the killing blow, to tell her to pack her bags and crush the last of her will, but he hesitated.  Disjointed images passed through his mind.  Albus hugging a sniveling, vomiting twenty-year old who had realized too late the horror of what he had done.  Albus giving him his confidence when no one else would.  Stanhope quietly choosing not to destroy his career.  Her wide, horrified eyes at the sight of what she had done.

     In the end, it was the first words out of her mouth that spared her.  _You need to send me home, sir.  _No begging, no rationalization, no cajoling.  Just calm acceptance of consequences and recognition that they must be lived with.

     "I'm going to investigate your claim, Miss Stanhope.  As I trust you've never lied to me, I expect I shall find proof of what you have told me.  If I don't, I'll fetch you from Gryffindor Tower and escort you to King's Cross personally."

     She stared at him.

     "Is that clear?"

     "Yes, y-yes, sir."

     "Good.  Then I consider the matter closed.  Dismissed."

     She had the good sense not to thank him.  She nodded and rolled toward the door.  

     "Miss Stanhope?"

     She turned.

     "I expect a twenty foot parchment on Potions safety in one week."

     "Yes, sir."

     He noted with satisfaction that she had paled at the length of the essay.  He hadn't gone soft, after all.

     _The debt is paid, _he thought as he watched her leave.  _The scales are even, and we're back at the beginning.  Pray we don't end up here again.  My cup does not run over.  Goodness and mercy do not follow me.  Everything has a price, and you will pay it._

     He stood and straightened his robes.  Time to go explain things to the Headmaster.  No doubt word of the incident had spread.  Feeling strangely light, he left the infirmary and closed the door behind him.

      


	14. The Lemon Sherbet War

Chapter Fourteen

     The walk to the Headmaster's office went much more smoothly than the trip to the infirmary.  The Incendi-Soothe had done its work admirably, and his pain was a distant memory, though the skin would remain red for several days.  He moved quickly, relishing the ability to do so.  Yes, the medicine had worked splendidly.

     _What did you expect?  You made it, after all, _he thought smugly.  It was a vain boast, but one to which he was perfectly entitled.  Though nearly none liked to acknowledge it because of his past association with the Death Eaters, he was, quite simply, the best Potions Master in Europe.  When a particularly delicate decoction was required, it was his name scripted on the parchment.  The richest wizards in Europe would gladly make a deal with a suspected devil when a life was on the line.

     At the top of the spiral staircase, he raised his hand to knock.

     "Come, Severus," the Headmaster called before his fingers had a chance to strike the wood.

     He swept in without a word and closed the door behind him.  "So you heard, then, Headmaster?"

     "Of course I did," he answered, putting down his quill and pushing his spectacles up onto his nose.  "The gossip of the young is faster than the wind.  Sometimes I think, when better judgment escapes me, that they would make most excellent couriers to carry dispatches regarding Death Eater movements."

     He snorted.  "They would be captured, tortured, and slaughtered before they could gather any useful information."

     "Quite so.  Which is why I have yet to put it into action.  And I won't, so long as I have the slightest grip on my senses."

     "May I sit, Headmaster?"

     "Oh, yes, of course!"  He gestured at the seat in front of his desk.  "Must be getting rude in my dotage.  Sherbet lemon?"  

     Snape sneered at the proffered bowl.  "Alas, I must regretfully decline," he said drily, sitting in the chair with a flourish of his cloak.

     "Ah, Severus, you don't know what you're missing."  The Headmaster shook his head good-naturedly and plucked a candy from the bowl, popping it into his mouth with a sigh of contentment.

     "Tooth decay?" he muttered disagreeably.

     Dumbledore looked at him in real surprise, his eyes twinkling.  "Nonsense!  I've been eating them for almost one hundred and forty years and have yet to suffer a single cavity."

     "Not everyone is possessed of your singular good fortune."

     Dumbledore's shoulders sagged and the sparkle left his eye.  "I'm not at all certain how good my fortunes are, Severus," he said bleakly.  "One of the few wizards lucky enough to have lived beneath the threat of not one, but two, Dark wizards."  He took off his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his nose, as though it pained him.

     Not knowing how to respond, he sat stiffly in his seat, waiting for the old man to say something else.  It bothered him to see Albus like this.  He was his rock, his voice of reason amid the babel of insanity and confusion.  If Albus was lost, where did that leave _him?_  It was a frightening, unwelcome thought, and he shoved it away.

     "Headmaster, are you all right?" he ventured after a long minute of quiet.

     Albus looked up at him, starting slightly.  "Oh, yes.  Just very tired.  I feel every one my years tonight, Severus."  He slowly replaced his spectacles.

     Snape took a closer look at the face of the man sitting across from him.  Albus looked utterly spent.  There were dark circles beneath his eyes, charcoal smudges, violent against too-white skin.  His face was deeply lined, some of the lines etched so deeply that they resembled fleshy crevasses.  The eternal optimism that flickered and blazed in his eyes, the hope beacon that he dreamt of and clung to in the deepest, sweat-slicked throes of Cruciatus, was guttering, all but extinguished.  He looked old-ancient beyond the reckoning of years-and terribly sad.

     He suddenly felt very numb, as though he had been tossed headlong into an ice bath.  He had never seen the Headmaster look that way before, not even after the news of Voldemort's resurrection.  His hands fisted in his lap, eloquent explanation about Calamity Stanhope forgotten.

     _What is it, Albus?  What happened?_

     Betraying no emotion, he smoothed his robes and asked, "Has something happened?"

     Dumbledore shook his head.  "No, nothing.  That's what bothers me.  It's nearly a month past its due, and still there has been no word regarding the Death Eater initiations.  Lucius Malfoy hasn't mentioned anything, has he?"  He looked at Snape almost hopefully.

     "No.  His last correspondence was vague, almost secretive.  He made no mention of any ceremony."

     "Hmm," was Dumbledore's only response.  The furrowed brow and dim blue eyes were signs that he was deeply troubled.  Then, "Do you think they know?"

     He sighed.  A familiar ache was forming between his shoulder blades, and he unconsciously reached a hand back to knead it.  "In all likelihood, they've known for quite some time.  Lucius is dangerously perceptive, and even if he weren't, Voldemort's paranoia is legendary.  One of them is bound to have caught on."  

     "If that's the case, then I absolutely cannot allow you to return to them."

     "Don't be ridiculous," he spat, his hackles rising.  "I have to go.  You need me, need the information I can give you."

     "No information is worth your life, Severus.  I won't endanger you," came the adamant reply.

     Snape shot to his feet.  This little drama had been played out a thousand times, and both were well aware of how it would end, how it always ended.  They would argue, their stubborn wills clashing in an explosion of white-hot sparks.  Dumbledore would plead for his safety, and he would beg for his redemption.  In the end, the Headmaster would give in.  He had to.  Information was their only hope, and he was the only one who was in a position to gather it.

     "I've been in danger since the beginning.  This is hardly a new peril," he countered.

     "We can't afford to lose you.  You're too valuable, both as a spy and as a teacher.  You know the enemy better than anyone else, and if it comes to the worst, you can teach the students to defend themselves."

     "I thought you had strictly decided against such measures."

     "There are other ways."

     "None that will be effective."

     "You don't know that.  The point is, Severus, that you're of no use to me dead.  I won't send you to a meaningless death."

     Though he knew what was intended by the words, they still stung.  He stepped back, his face tight.  Never had it been put so bluntly.  _You are of no use to me dead._  There it was, then.  His sum value to the Headmaster.  And it was far less than he had dared hope.  A thing.  A commodity useful only until the end was achieved.  Not Severus Snape, battered and ravaged beyond belief, but a human being blundering in the black, filthy darkness to find his way home again.

     "I see," he said coldly.  "Well, I'll not die until you wish it, then."  His shoulders were throbbing.

     Dumbledore looked up sharply, and then understanding dawned on his weathered face.  "Oh, Severus, you misunderstand," he said in a soft, tremulous voice.  He came out from behind his desk and gently enfolded him in a tight embrace.

     He stood in the clumsy embrace, rigid as a tentpole.  It had been seventeen years since Albus had touched him this way.  Seventeen years since he had stumbled, weeping and blood-spattered into his office, blind with the horror of what he had done.  The feeling of that gentle-armed hug had saved his sanity and his life that night, and it now thawed the icy barrier that had begun to strangle his heart.  

     He awkwardly patted Dumbledore's slumped shoulders, shifting his weight from side to side.  "This won't do, Headmaster," he said gruffly.  "What if someone should see?"

     Dumbledore gave an incredulous huff of mirth and pulled away, his eyes moist.  "It's not as though we're engaged in anything sordid, dear boy.  I suspect that if anyone saw, they would simply take me for the dotty old fool that I am."

     "You possess one of the finest minds in the world.  I would hardly call you a fool," he said defensively, discomfited to see his mentor in such a state.

     "Oh, but I must be if I cannot make you see how much you mean to me.  You're not just a means to an end.  If something were to happen to you on my account-," he looked down, unable to finish the thought.

     "You're being quite maudlin, Headmaster.  I assure you that I will be perfectly fine," he said, not knowing any such thing.  To distract him from another round of teeth-gnashing, he said, "I believe I'll have a sherbet lemon."

     "Splendid!"  The Headmaster's eyes lit up, and he hurried around the desk to offer him the bowl.

     He jabbed his finger into the bowl and seized one of the sweets as though it were a prisoner of war.  It was hard and cool between his fingers.  He held it up and inspected it.  Sunshine yellow with a thin sugar coating.  Handling it like it was the rarest of poisons, he placed it in his mouth.

     He nearly spit it out.  It was tart, yet sickeningly sweet.  It tasted like goat urine.  He sneaked a look at Albus, who was eyeing him with beatific satisfaction, and promptly decided he would eat the whole bowl of the damn things if it made him happy.

     _Not the kind of penance I'd envisioned for myself, _he thought wryly.

     "How is it?" Dumbledore asked, beaming at him.

     "Smashing," he murmured, wondering if his face had turned green and counting the seconds until he could swallow the obnoxious confection.

     "Ah, a convert!  They're irresistible!"

     _They're reprehensible is what they are.  _He sat in his chair and waited for him to change the subject.  He would rather strangle on the tip of Voldemort's wand than sing the praises of sherbet lemons.

     They sat in companionable silence for a while.  The Headmaster was clearly enjoying the spectacle of seeing him grapple with the sticky-sweet candy.  Then he said, "Is there something you wished to discuss?"

     "You've heard of the incident with Miss Stanhope."

     "Yes.  I suppose you're here to see about her expulsion."

     "No.  I'm not.  I've taken what I feel to be the appropriate action.  I consider the matter closed.  I just wanted to apprise you of the situation," he said stiffly.

     Dumbledore looked surprised.  "No?  If I recall, you were most vociferous in your displeasure at her presence here.  You called her a danger, and it would seem that this incident has proven you correct.  Has something changed your mind?"

     "Yes."

     Dumbledore looked intrigued.  May I ask what?"

     He considered the question.  Why had he relented?  When had he relented?  The first question was difficult.  Even now, nearly thirty minutes after he had let her roll back to Gryffindor Tower, he still wasn't sure why he had done it.  Part of him still couldn't believe he really had.  He was numb, dazed, disbelieving of his own benevolence.  He contemplated the toes of his boots.

     _You owed her._  

     Yes, that was part of it, certainly, but not all, not even close.  He owed a great many people in his life, and he had never seen fit to grant them leniency.  If anything, he was compelled to push them harder, more ruthlessly, to compensate for his embarrassment at the burden of debt.  He made them rue their compassion.  He even owed Potter his life, and Hell would freeze over before he willingly repaid _that _debt.

     _You already have.  A thousand times over._

     Not that Potter would ever believe that.  As far as he was concerned, he was the Antichrist, the spawn of the devil, and the bearer of darkness and damnation.  Nothing would ever change his mind.  After all, Potters were never mistaken.

     _Ungrateful little bastard._

     Sometimes when he saw the boy strolling through the corridors with his friends, he wanted to grab him by his arrogant, entitled shoulders and drag him to all the places where he had shed his blood and wept his scalding tears.  He wanted to push him to knees before the dark and eroding bloodstains on the basement floor of Voldemort's crumbling, stinking lair and shriek, "Do you see this?  Do you know what it is?  It's my blood!  I shed it for you, so that you can go on breathing, go on laughing at me, ridiculing me!  Every breath you take was a breath stolen from me, so be grateful for it!"  He wanted to show him the places where he had vomited blood while Lucius laughed, his rich, cultured voice piercing the eerie darkness like the eager death cry of a coming banshee.  He wanted to show him the price of his life.  He couldn't, of course, and that made his sacrifice all the more bitter.

     _But you don't do it_ just_ for the sake of Potter._

     No, he didn't.  Much as the thought might dismay young Potter, the world, _his_ world, did not revolve around the Child of Light.  He did it for the preservation of his world, so that the world in which he had lived and learned to hate, to discern light from dark, to savor grudges like fine wine, could continue as it always had.  It was ugly and disjointed and cruel, but it was what he had known, and it was far better than what Voldemort, with his twisted megalomania and limitless savagery, would ever offer.  

     And he did it for Albus.  Albus was in as much danger as Potter, maybe even more.  Albus had the power and respect about which Voldemort could only dream and fume.  He had thwarted the darkness time and time again.  Long before Potter had even been conceived of as more than a fancy in the starry eyes of his idealistic parents, the man on the other side of the desk had staved off the crawling, insidious blackness, outwitted it by cunning and sheer brass.  The triumph of Harry Potter hadn't been the end of the battle, nor had it been the beginning.  It had been a lull, a brief reprieve, and the festivities were about to recommence.  This time, it would be winner take all.  If he won, Voldemort would leave no survivors.

     Especially not Albus.  Him least of all.  He would be killed, but not before hours, days of unceasing torture.  He would pay for his cheek, for his temerity.  Slowly.  Before Death snatched away his prize, every humiliation, every indignity at the Dark Lord's command would be heaped upon his shoulders.  So he did it for Albus.  Potter could go to Hell.

     _That's all very nice, but what has it got to do with Rebecca Stanhope?_

_    Ah, that was the issue, wasn't it?  Damn that Potter boy!  Insinuating himself into my bloody thoughts now._

_     Hardly his fault that you've developed an unhealthy fixation._

He ignored the snide voice and groped at the question.  Why?  What had he let her go when he had her so firmly in his grasp?  

     _Was it the respect?_

Yes, that was part of it, too.  There was something refreshing about having the respect of a student that was not born of fear.  It had been at the beginning, but somewhere along the line, somewhere in the hundreds of hours they had spent together, it had shifted.  One evening, he had glanced into her face while inspecting her potion to see that the fear had left her, like the breaking of a long and cruel fever.  There was still wariness there, watchfulness, but he thought that had always been there, and he doubted that it would ever go away.  It pleased him to see it.  It meant that she knew her boundaries and would not expect too much.  It meant he was still safe.

     Perhaps he had done it because he had been too shaken up to think clearly.

     _Bollocks! _his inner voice snapped forthrightly. 

     He supposed he had let her fragile, crackling neck slip unscathed through his fingers because she had expected him to snap it.  She had been waiting for it; he had seen the anticipation of it in her quivering shoulders, heard it in her listless, dead voice.  He had wanted to be contrary, to prove that he was not so predictable as all that.  He had wanted to catch the perpetual guardian off guard, and he had done it.

     The question of when was much easier to answer.  The instant she dropped her face into her hands and wept, he had known she would not be on the homebound train.  There had been too much honesty in the remorse, too much bald misery.  There had been no one else in that room, and yet she had wept as though something inside of her was irrevocably shattering.  She had hurt him, wounded Snape the Bastard in a way that most other pupils would have envied, and she had possessed the unmitigated gall, the teeth-grinding _bollocks_ to weep for it, sincerely and unashamedly.  To weep as though what happened to him still mattered.  The knowledge that she thought him worth weeping for had moved him, stunned him to his very core, and so he had let her go.

     As much as he loved Dumbledore, he could not tell him these things.  They were too private, too secret.  "I wasn't going to let her escape the horror of what she'd done so easily," he said irritably.  "Besides, if McGonagall found out I had a hand in expelling her latest cause, I'd never hear the end of it."

     _I'll not hear the end of it now, _he thought moodily.  _The instant she hears about this, she'll be charging into my chambers, waving her litany of charges like a herald.  I can just hear it.  'Are you satisfied, Severus?  You denied her basic supplies, and now look what's happened!'_

     He didn't have that long to wait.  The door to the Headmaster's office flew open with such a resounding crash that he could have sworn he saw a splinter of wood fly off.  She barged in, eyes blazing, mouth so tight it was as though she had swallowed her lips.  Her bun was practically leaping from her head.  She made a beeline for him, her hands fisted on her hips.

     "Are you satisfied, Severus?  You denied her basic supplies, and now look what's happened!"

     "Quite," he said flatly, folding his arms across his chest.

     She glared at him.  "I supposed you're pleased.  You've proven your point."

     "I'm dancing with glee.  It only took severe mutilation to do it."

     On the verge of another acid remark, she froze and dropped her gaze to his legs.  He pulled up the hem of his robe for her to see.  

     She eyed his legs dubiously.  "They look well enough to me."

     "The wonders of modern medicine and my Potions-making skill are to thank for that."

     "It's entirely your fault.  Your insufferable arrogance led to this.  You pushed that girl far too hard, and now you're reaping the consequences."

     He rolled his eyes.  "Spare me the sermon."

     "I suppose you're here to have the girl expelled," she seethed.

     "I did a merry dance along the way," he murmured.

     "How can you be so quick to destroy that girl's future?"

     "That's what I do.  Severus Snape, destroyer of dreams.  Death Eater, as you like to remind me."

     "You have no heart."

     "Thankfully, no.  That's why I sent her to Gryffindor Tower."

     "You're absolutely sou-you what?"  Her mouth ground to a halt.

     "I sent her back to Gryffindor Tower.  My cruelty knows no bounds."

     She looked nonplussed.  "Why?"

     "I want to watch her suffer, of course."

     Her anger re-ignited.  "I imagine you did a fine job of that on the way to the Hospital Wing."

     "Her suffering was most severe," he agreed.  "She seemed most concerned for my welfare."

     McGonagall snorted.  "I'll just bet."

     The cruel disbelief in that statement stung him.  Why was that so hard to believe?  Was he so distasteful to her, then?  Suddenly, he was angrier at her than he had ever been.  He wanted to torment her, punish her.  Absurdly, his eyes fell on the bowl of sherbet lemons.

     "Here, Minerva," he said, thrusting the bowl at her like a particularly deadly weapon, "have a lemon sherbet!"

     "Don't mind if I do," she shot back, plucking a candy from the bowl and jabbing it into her mouth as though the act should be an affront to his manhood.

     "I'll have one as well," said Dumbledore mildly, scooping a handful from the bowl he held.  "More than one."

     There was a thunderstruck silence.  After a moment, Snape set the bowl down with an irritated thump.  McGonagall stared at him in haughty contempt.

     "I am rather fond of that bowl, Severus," Dumbledore chided.

     "My apologies, Headmaster," he muttered, scowling at McGonagall before resuming his seat.

     "Now that everyone has had their fill of those delightful lemon sherbets, perhaps we might discuss this affair with a bit more decorum.  Minerva, if you would, please close the door."

     McGonagall did as she was asked, sparing the newly acquired gouge in the door a guilty grimace.

     "Nothing a Repair Charm won't mend," he reassured her.  When she was seated again, he folded his hands beneath the white down of his beard and fixed her with a beatific look.  "I think you'll be most surprised at what Severus has to say."

     Snape felt a pang of smug satisfaction at the quizzical look on his colleague's face.  "I have no interest in expelling Miss Stanhope," he said, smirking.  "I have questioned her about the incident and do not believe she was at fault."

     "You what?" McGonagall said, sounding as though she had just been struck in the head with a brick.

     He couldn't really blame her.  He had never been known for his interest in fairness or the truth, especially where the students were concerned.  He found a suspect and meted out punishment without a moment's consideration for guilt or innocence.  As long as someone suffered for disrupting his routine, he was satisfied.  That he should change that philosophy now and for his least-liked charge was bound to shock anyone.

     If he couldn't explain to Dumbledore, the man he trusted more than anyone else, why he had let Rebecca Stanhope escape the tightly knotted noose, then he certainly wasn't going to be able to explain it to her.  There was no way _to_ explain it, not that he could find.  Logic had not played a part in the decision, and it was probably the first decision of any kind he could say that about.  He had simply felt that he had to let her go, that it was right.

     It made him uneasy, the realization that feelings had made the decision for him.  He was not a creature of feeling.  He made sure of that.  Nothing but anger and cold stoicism had permeated his emotional filter in a very long time.  Certainly not compassion or mercy, those indefinable concepts fashioned by humanity to make itself appear more civilized.  Those feelings were foreign to him, as alien as breathing water.

     What was it that had stayed his hand?  It wasn't compassion, he was sure.  He was incapable of that.  He had never felt it in his life.  Childhood had left little room for it, and his nightmarish adulthood even less.  Every drop of it had been leached from his bones like water leached from burning desert sand.

     _That isn't true.  If it were, you'd still be a Death Eater._

     _I stopped being a Death Eater because there was no honor in it.  No honor in killing the weak and miserable._

_     You stopped being a Death Eater because you couldn't stand the sight of babies and toddlers being torn apart-flayed alive or dismembered in their living rooms for the simple reason that they lived and breathed._

_     I still see things like that every time I stand in that circle.  Have you yet to see me weeping on my knees?_

_     No, but you come home and stand in your chambers with that hideous mask in your hand and you hate yourself for even being there, for breathing the same air as people who hate so much that they can feel no other emotion.  You stand there in your dirty, sweaty robes and wonder if they knew how much you hated them, hated everything they stood for, how your stomach clenched and burned with the indigestion that never seems to leave you anymore every time they laughed at their twisted entertainments.  You wonder if Voldemort can sense your disgust when your lips brush that cold, grey hand.  You wonder these things because you're different from them, and you know it.  It isn't stoicism that's given you those ulcers._

_     Don't confuse guilt and self-loathing with compassion._

_     You can't have guilt without compassion._

He curled his lip at such a libertine philosophy.  The Headmaster was watching him closely, too closely for his liking, so he covered his discomfort with biting sarcasm.  "Far be it for a Slytherin to observe school policy."

     "You've never done so before, why start now?"  She folded her hands over her knees and glared at him.

     Dumbledore stepped in to cut short another blazing row before it could start.  "And what did you find?"

     He sat back in his chair, letting his long frame uncurl.  "According to Miss Stanhope, she was seized by a sudden, agonizing stinging.  Possibly a Curse."

     "You say that as if you don't believe her," McGonagall accused.

     "On the contrary, she is one of the few Gryffindors I _do_ believe," he said laconically.

     McGonagall drew herself up.  "We Gryffindors do not lie," she said hotly.

     "You do when it suits you.  "Take Potter, for instance."

     He drew a great deal of satisfaction in watching her sputter and haw at that.  There was nothing she could say to that, no defense she could offer up.  It was patently true.  She and Dumbledore were both willing to break the rules for the Golden Child, to look the other way at his obnoxious disregard for the rules.  Even Albus looked a bit chagrined at the truthfulness of his remark.  That was merely bemusing.  He would file away Minerva's seething, baleful, constipated embarrassment for private relish later.

     "Have you any idea who the culprit might be?" she asked tersely.

     "Draco Malfoy."

     "Of course!  That little troublemaker has been after her since she arrived."  Faced with the prospect of finally getting her hands on the most pampered brat in the school, she suddenly looked considerably less perturbed.  For the first time since entering the office, she looked cheerful.  "An incident like this could get him expelled."

     "I'm afraid it's not that simple."

     She suddenly looked suspicious.  "Don't tell me you're going to let him get away with this!"

     "I'm in a very precarious position."

     "A position of your own making."

     "That has been a long-established fact, one I have never denied," he muttered.  "Nonetheless, it would look suspicious if I allowed the only son of a prominent Slytherin alumnus and Voldemort's most trusted servant to be expelled.  My name would have to appear on the expulsion request."

     "Then I'll punish him.  I may not be able to expel him, but I can certainly make things difficult for him," she huffed, and it was evident that her mind was racing with the possibilities.

     "You were not a witness to the incident, and I'm afraid we've no concrete proof that's he's done anything," Dumbledore reminded her.

     Her face fell.  "Then he's going to get away with it, isn't he?  Just like always."

     _At least then there would be equal justice, _he thought.  "I shouldn't worry, Minerva.  I'll take care of him."

     Both of them looked at him.  He had never volunteered to discipline a member of his House before, and his tone had sounded faintly amused, as if he were looking forward to the event.  McGonagall lost her mask of indignant bitterness, no doubt intrigued.  Dumbledore looked thoughtful.

     "What do you have in mind, Severus?"  He was stroking his beard, a sure sign that he was unsure of the course events had taken.

     "I assure you, Headmaster, it will not be fatal.  Or at least not messy.  We Slytherin can be quite…subtle when it comes to meting of justice."  He gave a small, humorless smile.

     Before they could ask him what he meant, he stood up, and with a small nod, he took his leave, leaving them to wonder, what exactly, he had in mind.

     At half-past six, less than fifteen minutes after he had returned from dinner, Draco Malfoy heard the Slytherin Common Room door open with a resounding crash.  The hairs on the back of his neck prickled in anticipation.  Only one person made an entrance like that.  He looked up from the desk where he sat composing a Transfiguration essay for the deadly dull and utterly inept Professor McGonagall.  If he ever used a single thing the bothersome old biddy taught him, he would send her an engraved invitation to visit Malfoy Manor.

     Though he was Head of House, Professor Snape's incursions into the Slytherin Common Room were rare.  He preferred to pass his time locked in his gloomy laboratory, brooding over his simmering, sizzling decoctions.  For the most part the denizens of Slytherin's lair were left to fend for themselves.  Neglect, in the eyes of the weepy-eyed liberals who tied their children to their skirts with their cloying overprotection.  Self-reliance, to the saner and more pragmatic.

     The independence suited them well.  While the other Houses simpered and sniveled beneath the auspices of their Heads, quailing and scattering in fright at the first signs of trouble, they watched and seized opportunities.  They marshaled forces, closed the ranks, protected their secrets, and made the necessary sacrifices to keep the unit alive, to be ready for that next golden moment.

     Not to say that they were a steadfast, loyal House.  Their very independence precluded such sentiments.  They fought for the House only so long as they fought for themselves.  Once those goals diverged, it was every man for himself.  Betrayal, or the threat of it, was as natural to the House as the hundreds of serpents that decorated every surface.  Betrayal was your ally and tool, even as it threatened you.  It was the double-edged blade with the poisoned tip.  The air was always charged with anticipation.  It was an environment he found stimulating.  He thrived in it.  He felt himself growing stronger with each passing day.

     That he flourished here did not surprise him.  His roots were here, buried deep beneath these floors for untold miles.  Generations of his family had walked through this room, slept in these dormitories.  His grandfather had been Head Boy.  His father had been a prefect.  As a child, he had often played with the shiny badge, dreaming of the day he would have something so prestigious.  He was a Malfoy; it was his birthright.  And it would make his father proud, maybe for one moment thaw the façade of ice he lived behind.

     _There is nothing on this Earth that will achieve that._

Maybe not, but it was his dream, and he would cling to it for as long as he could.  Even bastards were entitled to dreams.

     The professor stalked across the room, his eyes smoldering.  He moved with his customary fluid grace, no trace of the staggering injuries he had suffered.  He was glad.  He had not intended to hurt him.  He had merely been in the way.  Collateral damage.  Not his concern, really.

     "Good evening, sir," he said, flashing his most engaging smile.  "I see you've recovered from the Stanhope debacle."

     Snape whirled around so quickly that he involuntarily pushed his chair away from the desk  

     "Do you doubt my Potions-making ability?" he snapped.

     _Something is amiss here.  I'll bet that Mudblood freak Stanhope had something to do with this._  His mind began to click furiously.

     "Not at all, sir," he said, quickly recovering his aplomb.  "Are you all right?"

     "Come with me."

     His stomach jumped into his throat and then plummeted to his knees.  He knew that tone well.  It was the sound of doomsday, the sound that told everyone above the blithering first-years to pack their trunks and flee.  He had heard it used many times before, and the poor recipient generally emerged red-faced and snerking, tripping over themselves to retreat to the dormitories where they could whimper in privacy.

     "Have I done something, sir?"

     Silence.

     _He knows._

     So what if he did?  Surely he wasn't going to punish him for tormenting some useless Mudblood?  He quickened his stride to keep up as he followed him toward his private office.

     _Well, you did burn the skin off his legs._

_     I most certainly did not.  It wasn't my arm that tipped the cauldron._

_     It was your spell._

His stomach slid into his ankles.  This could be very bad.  Snape was not a forgiving man.  He cherished his grudges, treated his hatreds like gleaming trophies.  Sometimes he watched him at breakfast and at dinner, and he saw him polishing those old loathings behind his eyes, fondling them like treasured objects.  He had always pitied those unfortunate enough to earn a place on his wall of shame.  Now it looked like he might become one of them. 

     _Father will kill me.  _

     Father was the least of his worries.  If Snape deducted points from his own House, it would be a first.  And if he were going to set such a precedent, he would not do so lightly.  He would make sure the deduction was severe and crippling.  And the person responsible for forcing him into such a position would be a pariah, snubbed by his Housemates as an outcast.  He, who had once been the prince of princes, would find himself in the untenable position of persona non grata in the House that shouldn't be.  He would become invisible, and that was unacceptable.

     _You'll still have Crabbe and Goyle._

Fine, sculptured lips curled in disgust.  Having Crabbe and Goyle was worse than having no one at all.  They were stupid, bovine, and useless.  What was more, they were easily bought.  He was under no illusion about the depth of their friendship.  It was as deep as his father's purse strings, and no more.  They were accessories, like his plush velvet cloak or the jade clasp at his throat.  The best friends money could buy.

     Snape led him into the cramped confines of his office.  "Lumos," the professor hissed, and the torches in his office sputtered into life.  The wand disappeared.  "Close the door."

     He closed the heavy door and looked around.  It was evident that the room had not been used in a very long time.  The filthy little house elves kept it clean, of course, but the infrequent habitation was obvious if you knew how to look.  It was cold in here, colder than in any other part of the castle.  His breath plumed in front of him, and hard knots of gooseflesh sprouted on his forearms.  A glance at the clean fireplace grate told him that months had passed since a blaze had flickered there, and the absence of firewood told him there would be none in the future.

     "Your wand."  Snape held out a hand, his face impassive.

     "Of course, sir."  His mouth was very dry and filled with a bitter, smoky tang.

     Snape plucked the wand from his outstretched hand and examined it, his eyes roving over the flawless cherry finish.  He tapped an inquisitive finger against the wand tip.

     "Tell me, Mr. Malfoy, if I were to examine your wand more closely, what would I find?"

     "I don't understand, sir," he said, knitting his brow into a mask of perfect confusion.

     Snape appraised him with those daunting black eyes.  _Oh, yes you do, _they told him.  "No Curses, no illegal spells?"

     "No, sir."

     "Then you won't mind?"  His own wand pointed at the one on the desk.  _"Priori Incantateum!"_

     He could only bite the inside of his cheek as the first spell out of his wand was the Needling Hex he had used on Stanhope.  His heart was hammering in his ears.

     "Indeed," Snape murmured, eyeing him thoughtfully.

     "Sir, I can-,"  But Snape cut him off.

    "I was hoping it was you."

     "Sir?" he managed, stunned by the dramatic turn of events.  

     "Even Stanhope isn't so stupid as to have one of her fits in front of a boiling cauldron.  I saw her reaching for that odd stick of hers.  I knew it must have been a Curse.  Well done."

     Draco felt his shoulders relax.  "But I thought you were going to deduct points," he said, feeling a little foolish.

     Snape snorted.  "The day I deduct points from my own House for the sake of some insipid, whinging Gryffindor is the day I submit my resignation.  In fact, I am awarding thirty points for ingenuity.  However, in the future, I must ask that you exercise a bit more care.  I have no desire to end up like Stanhope."

     Draco chuckled.  "Yes, sir."

     All of the tension left his body.  The danger had passed.  His fears seemed silly in hindsight.  Of course Professor Snape would offer no punishment.  He understood.  They thought alike, as did all great minds.  He would see the value in what he had done, the necessity of it.  He was Slytherin, through and through.

     "Sir, did they expel her?"

     A cough that might have been sardonic laughter.  "Of course not.  She's Gryffindor, _and _she's the Headmaster's charity case.  Nothing short of murder will get her out of here."

     Draco rolled his eyes.  "I don't know why he accepted her in the first place.  I knew he was a Muggle lover and a Mudblood apologist, but this is beyond comprehension.  People like her don't deserve to live, much less taint magical ground like Hogwarts.  My father always said he was a crackpot."

     Snape's eyes flashed, and for an instant, he thought he saw rebuke in those black pits, but he only said, "Bring me the Incendi-Soothe from the Potions stock in the Common Room.  My skills are above reproach, but Madam Pomfrey's are not."

     "Yes, sir."  He enjoyed the Professor's acerbic observations about others.  They were uncannily true to the mark.  He'd always thought Madam Pomfrey was an incompetent cow, especially after his Quidditch mishap in second year.  He'd lain there in the grip of unspeakable agony while she had fluttered and twittered over Potter as though he were at Death's very door.  She'd neglected and endangered his health so that Potter could upstage him once again.

     _Prejudiced old bitch, _he thought, and left his wand on Professor Snape's desk.

     When the door closed behind Draco, Snape sat back with a ragged sigh.  _Damn that boy._

     Even after five years, Malfoy's sheer, undiluted arrogance still stunned him, still chafed.  There was no reason why it should; he had known his father for twenty years, long enough to know the he was likely the most self-important sod on the face of the Earth.  Possessed of arrogance potent enough to swamp everything in his path.  The very grass trembled beneath his feet.  Arrogance powerful enough to imprint itself on the genes of the next generation.

     And it had.  It came off the boy in staggering waves.  Along with the limitless Malfoy bankroll, it was his legacy.  It was the mark of his line, a genetic inheritance.  It would never be cleansed.  That fact stung him.  He had hoped that perhaps the boy would have chosen a different path, learned from the sins of his father.

     _Whatever made you think that?  He's been smothered in that noxious influence since the day he was born.  It is inescapable.  Who else would he look to for guidance?  You?  Folly.  You barely exist on the periphery of his vision._

That was true.  He barely existed on the periphery of anyone's vision.  To the students, he was the morose, nasty bane of their lives, the despot they loved to hate.  To the faculty, he was the unhappy sinner seeking his penance from the only man willing to give it.  No one looked any closer than that.  No one wanted to.  He had made sure of that.

     He was not sorry for his solitude.  He cherished it.  He did not long for a gaggle of boisterous, jolly friends.  He did not wish to be known as a fine, upstanding man.  He liked being left to do as he pleased when he pleased.  He had no desire to bare his soul like some sniveling, lovelorn poet.  Sometimes, though, he wished that he could leave something to the world other than legions of former pupils who shuddered at his name, something that would justify his presence in the eyes of the Fates.

     _And you thought you could save Draco?_

     He had been sure of nothing, but he had noted that he, unlike the other students, did not fear him.  He had even seemed to hold him in some esteem.

     _He respects you only because he thinks you agree with him, that his father's elegant poison flows through your veins.  As soon as he realizes it doesn't, the respect will fade.  In a few years, it will be gone anyway.  An adult Malfoy respects no one, only uses those he can.  He is a lost cause._

So he was.  He saw it more and more every day, the molding of Voldemort and his father.  Each day, his shriveled humanity eroded a little more, leaving only senseless hatred.  It was too late for Draco Malfoy, and the knowledge made him angry.  Looking into that self-assured, sneering face made him sick because he saw the untapped, wasted potential behind it.  Sometimes, he desperately wanted to grab him by the collar of his immaculate robes and shake him until his teeth rattled and the dense fog of unearned privilege left his brain.

     The boy was just like his father.  Sleek, cunning, arrogant as a drunken lord, and confident of his position atop the wizarding world.  He was insulated by reality, ignorant of the existence of consequences, of repercussions.  Those things did not exist for him, and unless things changed dramatically, they never would.  No one would ever dare challenge him.

     _Except…_

     Except he was going to.  He knew all about life and its consequences.  Who better than he to teach him the hard lessons that his father would not?  It would be part of his curriculum.  Yes.  And one of the first lessons he would learn was that betrayal didn't always come from the enemy without.

     He picked up the wand, a small, predatory smile on his face.  A fine lesson.  He looked at the door.  Draco would return any moment now.  

     _You're far too trusting, Mr. Malfoy._

     When Draco returned a few minutes later, he noticed nothing peculiar about his wand.  Snape only smiled.


	15. Watching the Serpent

Dedicated to all victims of fanfic plagiarism.  May hard work never go unrewarded, and may those who siphon off the sweat and tears of the truly inspired get what they deserve.

Chapter Fifteen

     Rebecca was tired.  She rolled into the bathroom on the morning of the Halloween Feast and rested her head on the cool porcelain of the sink.  It was always like this.  The dull cramps were slow and constant, digging into her lower abdomen the way they always had.  For six days out of every month, she cursed her femininity.  Whoever had dubbed it the "Red Curse" had been right on.

     _Why can't I have a normal period like everyone else? _she thought, turning on the tap and reaching groggily for her toothbrush.

     _Nothing about you is normal.  Why should this be?  Besides, some have it worse._

_     Thanks, Grandpa.  No offense, but what would you know about it?_

_     I was married to your grandma for thirty-seven years.  I know a thing or two.  _The voice sounded miffed.

She cocked her head, considering.  Well, that was a comment she wouldn't be able to get out of her mind for weeks.  Not to mention the unpleasant images it was conjuring.  She thought about pursuing the matter, but decided she might like to enjoy her breakfast.  She let it drop.

     "Winky," she called through a mouthful of foaming toothpaste.

     The little elf instantly materialized in the doorway, wide-awake and eager to please.  "Yes, miss?"

     Rebecca resented her cheerfulness.  How could anyone be so cheerful at this hour of the morning?  She spat into the sink, suddenly unsure of herself.  "Um, well, you see, it's…that time of the month, and I think I need a little help."  She felt her cheeks flush plum.

     Winky looked confused.  "Time of the month, miss?"

     "You know, my period."  She wished the floor would swallow her up.  Father God and Sonny Jesus, she was discussing her menstrual cycle with a house elf.

     This was not the first time, but it was always awkward.  It made no difference who, or what, she was talking to.  Discussing intimate bodily functions with other people or creatures was mortifying.  Having blood dribbling down your thighs was something private, something between you and your body.  It was a secret thing.  Ancient people knew this.  That was why they sent their women away from them.  They understood it was a personal, sacred affair.

     Nothing was sacred for her.  Doctors, nurses, and house elves saw everything, touched everything.  They knew when she urinated, when she moved her bowels, and when she ovulated.  They even kept little charts about it.  She was certain that when she had sex for the first time, they would know that, too.  Probably mark it with a gold star and titter, and then call her into the Hospital Wing for a demeaning examination.  

     Winky's expression cleared and comprehension gleamed in her eyes.  "Oh, my, yes, miss!  That is explaining why you is looking so awful!" she chirped.

     She snorted laughter.  "Where would I be without your honesty, Winky?"

     "Is you using Madam Belladonna's Ultra-Tidy, or Mistress Jupiter's Sleek n' Smooth?"

     "I've been using Kotex," she muttered.

     "I is not hearing about them.  I is coming right back," she declared, and disappeared.

     She was back in less than five seconds, holding a sanitary napkin above her head like a cherished prize.  "Here we is."

     "Where did you get that?" she asked, hoping she had filched it from one of the other girls but knowing better.

     "I is getting it from Madam Pomfrey," came the proud reply.

     "Of course."

     "Something is wrong?"

     Looking into those bulbous, hopeful eyes, she couldn't bring herself to snap at her.  She managed a wan smile.  "No, no, Winky, everything is fine."  

     Brilliant.  Madam Pomfrey knew she was on her period.  Which meant that McGonagall would know before the mouthwash had faded from her breath.  And if the old witch held to form, that meant that Professor Snape would hear about it at breakfast, probably couched among a plea for clemency on account of her "fragile condition."  Lord.  The entire faculty would know before midday.  Welcome to the life of Rebecca Stanhope.  She felt like laughing and crying at the same time.

     "Let's get this over with," she snapped, irritated by the prospect of the knowing looks that would be sent her way from the High Table.

     "Yes, miss."  The little voice quavered.

     The red balloon of her anger deflated.  "I'm sorry, Winky.  I shouldn't be so snippy.  This is just embarrassing."

     Winky immediately relaxed.  She clucked sympathetically.  "You is not to be embarrassed.  "I is never telling a soul.  It happens to everyone."  She wagged a maternal finger at her knee.

     Feeling a little better, Rebecca smiled and pulled off her nightclothes.  Sure enough, there was a bright red stain.  She grimaced.  Now that she was awake, she was keenly aware of the smell, a dark, primitive, fishy, coppery stink.  She hated that smell.  No matter how much powder or perfume you doused it with, it always came to the top, pungent like rancid cream.  It clung to everything-your skin, your clothes.  It never left your undergarments.

     "Ew.  I guess that means the sheets need washing," she said.

     Winky flapped her leathery little hand in dismissal.  "You is not worrying about that.  Right now, you is the one that is needing a wash."

     Two minutes later, Rebecca found herself awash in peach-scented bubbles.  Winky was a scrubbing dervish, a happy, humming brown blur.  She let herself be tended, happy for the contact and the opportunity for relaxation.  The steaming water was doing wonders for her cramps.  Beneath the frothy, quivering bubbles, they were barely noticeable.  The heat was stupefying, and she leaned back in a happy daze.  Even the muscles in her hips relaxed, letting go with a dull twinge.  She purred.

     Winky beamed.  "Winky's mum is always telling her that a hot bath is good for the crampsies, oh, my, yes.  They certainly helps Winky."

     Rebecca raised her head.  Winky had cramps?  If Winky had cramps, then that must mean…  "You have cramps?" she said, sounding stupid even to her own bubble-clogged ears.  "Does that mean you have a…period, too?"

     The elf paused in her vigorous scrubbing of a particularly hard-to-clean section of her lower back.  "Of course, miss.  We house elves is not growing on trees."  Her voice held a hint of rebuke.

     "No, I guess not," she answered lamely.  "I just never thought about it.  I mean, Dinks, my friend at D.A.I.M.S., was a guy."

     "Not so unusual, miss."  She resumed her thorough scrubbing.  "We is not noticing those things.  We is polite."

     That was an understatement.  The fascinating creatures were so bent on pleasing their masters that they noticed nothing else.  A doomsday hurricane could be raging in the parlor, and the only concern on the proper house elf's mind would be the lemon tea his master had ordered.  And it didn't really matter who the master was, either.  It could be a polished newel post.  They lived to serve.

     So she wasn't worried that Dinks had been eyeing her with lecherous intentions.  He had never done anything questionable or untoward in his life.  His conduct had been exemplary.  It was just disconcerting to know that a male of any species had been looking at her _there_.  She had known and loved Dinks since she was eleven years old, and it had simply never occurred to her to ponder or affix any importance to his gender.

     She had never thought about their gender at all.  They just were, helpful little sprites that existed on the periphery of life, androgynous, having no lives beyond the images they projected.  That they would have knowledge of or experience with sexuality, gender, and all its trappings was staggering and more than a little uncomfortable.

     _What's the matter?  Don't like the idea of a horny house elf?_

_     Grandpa, please!  That is _not_ an image I need._  She hid her scarlet cheeks by dunking beneath the water.

     _Don't like that?  Well, the house elves have to come from somewhere.  If you ever get lucky, mebbe you could ask her for advice._

     An image floated through her mind of four skinny legs and two skinny, leathery buttocks moving underneath thin bed sheets while impassioned squeaks filled the air.

     _Oh, God almighty.  Dammit, Grandpa, that's enough.  I'll never get my mind clean again._

_     There's people think the same about you._

_     I don't care, _she fumed crossly.  _I've had enough of your filthy mind for one day._

Typical grandfather.  Bawdy, irreverent, and mired in dirty, unwholesome thoughts.  His prize possession was a tatty book of dirty Irish limericks.  She had never been permitted to look upon its pages, but she knew it was there and what was in it.  It held a prominent place on his bookshelf, a tantalizing tidbit of the forbidden.  She was well aware of his sense of humor, but the very idea of her grandfather contemplating the carnal habits of magical creatures as well as her own was too bizarre for articulation.

     He was right about one thing, though.  People did think the notion of her or people like her engaging in l'art del amor was queer, unfathomable, even disgusting.  Hell, even many crips thought it was outside the realm of the tasteful.  Sex was an activity for the abled, a fluid exercise, a tribute to beauty and lissome limbs.  It was not for the mobility impaired or those with gnarled, unwieldy bodies.

     Tasteful or not, there were the ballsy few who had the temerity to enjoy it unashamedly.  They limped or rolled through life with their paramours prominently on display, proud as defeathered peacocks and all the more brilliant for it.  Married or merely snugly tethered, they gave hope to the young spinsters with bony, closed knees languishing in D.A.I.M.S. or cloisters like it.

     There was resentment, too.  Subtle as cobra's poison, dripping from closely shaven fangs.  They kept their fangs hidden, so carefully hidden.  Their anger stayed on the inside, where it was refined and purified, made into something powerful, a tool that kept them alive and vigorous.  They sealed it behind their masks, unwilling to divide the clan, to dilute their strength.  But they never forgot, and the taste was bitter.

     _Would you join their number if you could?_

     Damn right she would.  All of them would.  It was survival of the least crippled when it came to the pursuit of life's pleasures.  Brotherly unity ended at the threshold of basic needs-food, shelter, human contact, and rudimentary sanity.  Everything else was anything goes, every-man-for-himself, grab it and go.  Love and sex were the glorious grails they sought, and they were worth the blood of an ally.  They would have betrayed one another in a heartbeat for the lurid promise of salty kisses and the languorous heat of sex.

     Sex.  It was the hidden energy of D.A.I.M.S.  The one magic the vigilant, ruthless staff couldn't control, ration out.  The need for it, for exploration into its rewards, sparked the air, charged it with an undercurrent of power as old as the bedrock of the Earth.  The staff smelled it, the musky tang of it hung in the air in a pheromone smog.  They couldn't stop it.  They couldn't stop nature.

     Under the brooding auspices of D.A.I.M.S' cold plaster walls, the students did what they could.  They were resourceful, enterprising.  That place had made them so.  Broom closets.  Shower stalls.  The furtive purr of clandestine wheelchair motors as they crept down the dark hallways on the way to a liaison.  All of these things were part of their night world.  And through it all, there were watchers.  The watchers saw everything.  Even in the dark.

     They may have betrayed one another for the sweet taste of midnight flesh, but they would have wordlessly and willingly climbed onto the pyres of eternal damnation before they gave each other up to their sullen guardians.  It was "us" versus "them," and not one of them was willing to cross that line, to turn stool pigeon.  That was a line, that, once crossed, could never be recrossed.

     So they lay in their beds, wrapped in the thin cotton linens, and they watched.  They listened.  They were vigilant.  Professor Moody would have understood.  He was always thundering about Constant Vigilance, and that was what they practiced, though she doubted he would have approved of such an application.  It was a well-honed skill, and their watchfulness had never faltered.  The seal of their secrecy was flawless.

     Ears strained against the darkness, sorting through the sounds, filtering out the harsh, ragged sounds of the search in their hunt for noises that should not be there.  The hushed, sibilant whisper of stifled breath.  The stealthy scrape of crepe-soled shoes on linoleum or industrial carpet.  The muted light of a searching flashlight.  Their nostrils flared, on the lookout for the telltale scent of an interloper's cologne.  They held their secrets close, and no one slipped their nets.

     They did not always enlist the help of a partner in their quest.  Sometimes they explored the mysteries of sex alone, hidden in their beds or in the out of the way closets.  They were too shy to expose themselves to someone else, too secretive in their desires.  She had been one of these.  She was intrigued by sex, but as yet too intimidated by the raw intimacy of it, too protective of herself, to submit to its allure.  So on the nights when she was not the watcher with her ear to the ground and her eyes caressing the shadows like old friends of long standing, she wrangled out its delicacies alone, breathing through her nose so her roommate wouldn't hear.

     Whether silent, unseen guardian or intrepid explorer, they were always protected from unwanted eyes.  They used whatever means they needed to, legal or otherwise.  They were ruthless.  To have such a means of exploration and expression was a mark of their independence, and they would surrender it to no one.  Three weeks before she left the drear of D.A.I.M.S., Jackson Decklan had stumped down the hall and pulled the fire alarm in the wee hours of the morning, sending wobbly students and bleary-eyed staff scurrying into the sweltering August dark.  In all the commotion, no one noticed Hattie Turkle and a rather pole-axed looking Jerold Hawkins creeping out the back door.

     The watchers had exchanged glances.  They toasted each other to a job well done, a secret kept.  They sat there in their filmy nightgowns, knobby, misshapen knees exposed to the voracious mosquitoes, and tittered, drawing curious, irritated gazes from the unhappy firemen who had been dragged from their cool fire station in the dead of night.  She didn't blame them.  They had no way of knowing.

     _They put out more than one fire that night, judging from the look on Jerold's face.  Rather flustered, he was._

     That thought ignited a spate of giggles, and she ducked beneath the water to try and quell them.  All she got was a mouthful of bubbles and lukewarm water, and she surfaced, spluttering, gagging, and laughing, her nose burning.  She leaned over the side of the tub and belched, watery bubbles dripping from the end of her nose.

     Winky's startled face appeared.  "Is you all right, miss?"  She wrung her hands.

     "Never better, Winky."  She spluttered.

     She couldn't believe she was thinking these things.  These thoughts were positively raunchy.  Not the sort of ideas she would ever have entertained at D.A.I.M.S.  Such ruminations were dangerous there.  Whatever discoveries the students made, they kept to themselves.  Delicious contraband.  Such frank contemplation was against the unwritten rules.

     But as she had so often noted of late, this was not D.A.I.M.S.  The air was freer here, less close.  Liberal thought was permitted, even encouraged, here.  She could think about sex all she liked.  No one would censure her for it.  She could even talk about it if she so desired, though, honestly, there was no one with whom she wanted to discuss it.  Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil would suffer herniated disks if they even suspected their misshapen, sullen roommate was imagining such things.  And she would sooner swallow a hand grenade than confide in priggish Hermione Granger.

     Winky floated her out of the tub, humming in her high little voice, and within ten minutes she was dried and dressed in her robes.  She felt fresh and comfortable, and she smiled when she felt Winky's long fingers plaiting her hair.

     "What would I do without you, Winky?" she sighed.

     "I is happy to help you!"  She sounded fit to burst.

     "You do realize you'll be washing me again in a few hours?  Damn Borgergups."

     "Winky doesn't mind.  She is glad to help."  

     She didn't doubt that.  The little elf was practically bouncing with suppressed anticipation.  "See you later, Winky."

     "Goodbye, miss.  Have yous a good day!"

     She paused at the door and looked back.  Winky was already hard at work, bustling around and tidying up.  Tottering beneath a mound of soiled linens, the expression on her face was absolutely beatific.

     _God bless you, Winky.  I'm so glad you're here._  She left without a word.

     The Common Room was a hive of groggy activity.  Everyone was awake, but almost no one looked happy about it.  They padded around in their robes, stifling yawns and gathering up their books and parchments for class.  She passed Lavender and Parvati, who sat on the bottom riser of the stairs, slumped on one another's shoulders.  Lavender was snoring softly.

     "'S mornin'" mumbled Parvati, her eyes drooping.

     She grunted in reply and moved into the Common Room proper.  She had nothing to say to that pair.  They stared more than the rest of the House combined, and it was clear that they did not move in her intellectual circles.  She had gathered that little morsel when Lavender had begun twittering cryptically about the terrible fate that would one day befall her.  She had let her babble for two or three sentences before rolling away in mid-sentence.  You didn't need a roadmap or a crystal ball to see that she had a tough row to hoe ahead of her.  Her chutzpah had earned a round of applause from Fred and George, as well as a new moniker.  Even Harry had sniggered behind his Charms homework.  Doom and Gloom were the House joke.

     She rather liked her new nickname.  "Mad Tempter of Fate," they called her.  At least the twins did.  They amused themselves for hours, tramping around the Common Room and the corridors, shouting that the Mad Tempter of Fate was at hand.  The pronouncement had garnered curious stares for the first few days, but soon the realization had dawned that this was yet another of Gred and Forge's tricks.  Now they smiled faintly and moved on.

     "Morning," she greeted Neville, who was stuffing his books and parchments into his bookbag.

     He brightened.  "Oh, good morning."

     "Ready for the Borgergups this morning?"

     Neville's face fell and his shoulders slumped.  "Don't remind me," he whimpered.  "They're awful!  Every day, I smell vile; no matter how many baths I take, I still stink to the heavens.  Why do they have to chunder all over everything?" he wailed.

     She knitted her brows in confusion.  "Chunder?' she repeated slowly.

     "Yeah, you know, chunder."  Then, after a pause, "Oh.  I guess you wouldn't know."

     "Chunder," said Seamus, who had just ambled down from the boys' dormitory, "means vomit."  He grinned at them and plopped into a chair by the fireplace.

     "Oh," she said, feeling stupid.  The British had such interesting slang.  She would have to learn it one of these days.  "Chunder" sounded so much more exotic and mysterious than the American equivalent of "barf."  She filed it away for future reference.  "They certainly do a lot of that."

     "A lot?"  Seamus gave and an incredulous huff.  "That's _all _they do.  Pick them up, they chunder.  Pet them, they chunder.  Set them in motion, they chunder.  Think about Quidditch…," he trailed off.

     "They chunder," she finished for him.

     "Too right.  Nasty little buggers.  Ought to be throttled."

     "Seamus," she chided.  "They aren't that bad."

     _Oh, yes, they are.  _

     For once, she couldn't argue.  They _were_ that bad.  It made no difference what they or Hagrid did; the critters continued to puke.  They were geysers.  Some of the more ingenious students had learned to put Vomit Repelling Charms on their robes before stepping into the gastronomic minefield that was the Care of Magical Creatures paddock, but most didn't want to waste the energy.  Even if they did deflect the warm, glotted mess, there was no avoiding the smell, rotten swamp gas and overripe apples.  Most just took their lumps and learned to love the smell of turpentine.

     "Blighters bite, too," Neville said, offering another indictment against the furry beasts.

     _He's right about that, too._

     "Well what can we do?  We need them to get good grades.  Strangling them is out of the question."  She scratched absently at the bridge of her nose.

     "Dunno," Seamus said glumly.  "Hagrid threw a bolt when we even suggested changing their diets."

     "No kidding."

     When the students had timidly suggested that perhaps the inordinate amount of cabbage the creatures devoured was responsible for the constant streams of vomit and flatulence, Hagrid had launched into a mind-numbing lecture about care of the Borgergup and why it was imperative that cabbage remain the staple of their diet.  When someone-Dean Thomas, maybe-had ventured that a simple reduction would do, Hagrid had become positively militant.

     "'S their favorite," he had explained, gazing at them as though they'd suggested the Borgergups should be roasted for sport.  "Yeh wouldn' want ta make them unhappy, would ya?  Think o' how yu'd feel if som'un took yer favorite treat away," he'd said indignantly, and that had been the end of it.

     Looking back on it, it might have helped if someone had thought to point out that none of their favorite treats caused them severe nausea and noxious gas.  Be an odd favorite if they did.  But Hagrid, God bless him, was obstinate about the handling of the beasts in his care, and in all likelihood such logic would only have fallen on deaf ears.

     Before any more debate could be waged on the subject, the twins appeared, smiling effusively, and, she thought, a trifle mischievously.  Looking at them was funny in an unsettling way.  They were a skewed mirror, reflecting each other in a slightly off-kilter fashion.  They were exactly the same, and yet they were different.  The same faces, the same long, gangly limbs, the same carrot-red hair, and the same bubbling, merry personalities.  Everything was identical.  They should have been absolutely the same.  But one was Fred, and one was George, and that made them different in a fundamental way, a way only mothers and lovers could sense.  Maybe not even them.  Maybe only God knew.

     "Hello there, O Mad Tempter of Fate," they chorused, bounding over to her and bowing low.

     She blushed and giggled, shooing them away.  "Oh, stop it, you two, or I shall rain my wrath down upon thee," she intoned in the deepest possible voice.  She thought she sounded like a bullfrog with a head cold.

     George fell to his knees, flinging out his arms in dramatic fashion.  "Oh, good lady, I beg of thee, visit not your anger upon my poor head!"

     "Hmm," she mused, stroking her chin.  "And why shouldn't I?  I wish it."  She might as well play along. 

     Fred leapt to his feet, prostrating himself in front of her.  "Oh, please, m'lady, take me if you must have a sacrifice."

     She fought to quash unvillain-like laughter.  More chin-stroking.  "Very well.  I shall have pity on you.  This time."  Her stomach followed this pronouncement with a loud rumble.

     Everyone laughed.  "You have spoken," crowed George.  "Off to breakfast.  It's nearly eight o'clock, I'll wager."

     She started toward the door, and then stopped.  "Dammit, I forgot my bookbag!"  She cupped her hand to her mouth to summon Winky.

     "I'll get it," volunteered George, and before she could stop him, he bounded up the stairs to the fifth-year girls' dormitory.

     Silence.  Indistinguishable squeaks.  Then, quite clearly, George.  "I've come for her virtue, little madam."

     "George Weezy!!"  Winky was not amused.

     George streaked down the stairs, laughing.  "We should go Rebecca.  Your house elf is a bit…vexed."

     "Can't imagine why," she said drily.

     A pillow came flying down the stairs, narrowly missing George's head.  "Now," he managed between guffaws.  "Before she finds something harder."

     They broke for the portrait hole, yodeling laughter.  Even Neville was laughing, his robes brushing against the back of her head as they moved.  Life with Fred and George was certainly interesting.  She pulled her head back, dodging her bookbag as it swung wildly from George's shoulder.  She snorted.  She hated to admit it, but she found she was enjoying pack life.

     _Wonder what George would look like without a shirt?_

The thought was so random that she nearly jerked to a halt.  Where had _that_ come from?  Worse yet, it wouldn't go away.  Her mind's eye was filled with visions of George sans shirt, sweating beneath the noonday sun, sweat trickling down his bare chest in salty rivulets.  The image was so vivid that her mouth went dry, and she felt the itchy prickle of sweat in her armpits.

     _Did Winky remember my deodorant?  _Then, _I wonder what Fred would look like?_

_     Probably a lot like George, _came the sardonic reply.

     All right, that was enough.  She had no business looking at and thinking of her two good friends like that.  It wasn't right.

     _Well, who are you going to think of, then?  Harry Potter?_

She coughed.  Definitely not.  She would rather be privy to Headmaster Dumbledore's bath than spend her time ogling chicken-chested, spoiled, revered Harry Potter.

     _Why did I have to say Dumbledore?  I don't need those thoughts._

_     Well, you could have thought of Argus Filch._

_     Please.  Not that.  Oh, not that._

What in the hell was wrong with her today?  She had sex on the brain.  She couldn't stop thinking of men in various states of undress, not all of them pleasant.  Filch, for Chrissakes!  Filch.  What was next?  Hagrid in swim trunks?

     _Why?  Why did you think that?_

     Her hormones had gone berserk.  That was the only possible explanation.  Her brain had been taken hostage by an overload of estrogen, and everything would be fine once everything leveled off.  The world would resume its more familiar, marginally saner hues, and the lurid, heat-haze images of scantily-clad men would retreat once more to the basement of her brain, where such uncivilized thoughts belonged.  Until then, she would just have to sit tight.

     Her eyes drifted down to the curve of George's buttocks, which, thankfully, were hidden by the voluminous folds of his robes.  They drifted over to Fred, where they found much of the same.

     _Stop it!  Stop it now!_  Her eyes remained fastened on two sets of swinging hindquarters.

     _It's Snape.  I know it's Professor Snape.  He's put some sort of Lust Potion in the air._

     The image of puritanical, fastidious Professor Snape slinking through the corridors spraying a musky, lust-inducing fragrance undid her completely.  She stopped abruptly, put her hands on her knees, and howled.  Neville bumped into her push handles with a soft _oof_ !

     "Sorry, Neville," she wheezed.

     Her face was the color of a ripe plum, and tears streamed down her face, but she couldn't stop.  It was too ludicrous.  She rocked back and forth and cackled, snorting and hiccoughing.  

     _I think you've unhinged._

_     I think you're right, but I don't care._

_     At least you're not fantasizing about Snape._

That sobered her.  That was one person who most assuredly would not inspire desire in her, and if he ever did, she would voluntarily check herself into St. Mungo's.  Frankly, she couldn't imagine him igniting passion in anyone.  It wasn't that he was irredeemably hideous; he wasn't, at least not to her.  He had breathtaking eyes.  It was his soul.  He was cold, so very cold.  There was no warmth, or precious little, and what spark of humanity that remained to him was fading daily.  He could offer nothing.  Nothing would grow in his patch of earth where no sunlight fell.  He could nurture nothing in the soil of his heart, not even himself.  Professor Snape might be a man one could respect, but he was not someone who could be loved.

     He was the first person she saw when she entered the Great Hall.  Seated third from the left, he hulked over a hapless bowl of porridge.  He was wide awake and glaring, bright black eyes scorching the students with disdain.  He was displeased to be breathing, even less pleased to be doing it at this hour of the morning, and his every move made it crystal clear.  As she watched, he plunged his spoon into the steaming gruel in front of him and jammed it into his mouth.  

     She blinked slowly and inclined her head in curt acknowledgment.  If he saw her, he gave no sign.  He brought another spoonful to his mouth and chased it with a sip of tea.  She rolled to her place at the Gryffindor table.  She was not surprised at his lack of reaction.  She was Public Enemy Number One after the scalding incident, and nothing was likely to change that.  

     _Then why do you nod to him every morning?_

     She didn't know.  She had done it for the first time the morning after the incident.  Then, it had been a mute apology, a silent expression of sorrow.  Now what it was, she couldn't say.  It just seemed right to keep doing it.  A way to say, "I am aware of you, but I am no longer afraid."  It was respect, too.  No matter what he did, she would pay him respect.  To do otherwise would grant him victory, and she was far from willing to concede the battle.

     "Here's your bag," George said, setting it by her wheel as he took his seat.

     "Thanks."

     Having a staredown with Snape, were you?"  He filled his plate with eggs and sausage.

     She jumped guiltily.  Had she been looking at him that intensely?  "I'd lose that in a heartbeat.  No, I was just saying good morning."  She reached for the toast.

     "Don't know why you bother."  He nudged the platter of toast closer to her reaching fingers.  "Won't move that old pile of rocks."

     "Probably not, but worth a try.  Turn his socks inside out if a student was actually nice to him, I bet."

     "You know, I think it would.  Might turn him positively green.  Suspicious old git would be convinced it was all a nefarious plot to kill him."

     "Snape is likely the one fellow you _could _kill with kindness," chimed in Fred, busily demolishing a pile of hashbrowns and a bowl of porridge.  "Worth a try."

     "I wish somebody would kill him," said Neville bitterly.

     She felt a stab of bright red irritation at that, but she smothered it behind her impassive face.  Her fortress was still intact for them, thank God.  She understood why Neville would say such a thing.  Being psychologically bullied by Professor Snape for five years was bound to foster roiling dislike.  And for poor, bumbling Neville, to whom nothing came easily, the burden of Professor Snape's cruelty must be all the heavier, but the statement still bothered her.  Ass or not, the man was a human being.  No life deserved to be stamped out for no reason other than blind hate.

     _Come now, girl, that isn't what's really bothers you.  No, what bothers you is that the man feels exactly the same way about himself.  He's waiting to die.  For somebody to kill him._

The piece of bacon she was chewing nearly caught in her throat.  Damn him, _damn_ his pragmatism.  That was true.  That was exactly what was wrong with her.  The old man had always been able to see right through her.  She could lie to anyone else, but not to him.  She had tried many times over the years, and all she had ever gotten for her troubles was a sore bottom.

     Professor Snape, for all his hard-nosed adherence to the British policy of keeping a stiff upper lip, was counting the days until he could lay his unwanted burden down and die.  That was why he kept everything so cold and loveless, why his furniture was uncomfortable, why he always wore funereal black, why he never lit a fire.  He wanted nothing to hold him here, no roots to tether him to this existence.  He fully expected to die, and he was not sorry for it.

     Not that there was much here to make him sorry for it.  Most of the students here felt like Neville did.  Even she did much of the time.  They wanted him to leave.  If he had fallen down dead in his porridge, most of them would have simply carried on eating.  Only his Slytherins would have missed him, but even then, she wasn't sure that they would _mourn_ him.  Likely they would merely rue that they had lost the most intimidating weapon at their disposal.  

     She turned to look at the Potions Master, letting the conversation around her fade to a distant hum.  He was busily scowling into his plate, his puff adder eyes scrutinizing his eggs for evidence of treachery.  He was tired.  She could see the weariness in his face, in the fine lines around his eyes and twining in the perpetually downturned corners of his mouth.  The shortening of her detentions had done little for him.  His mind was obviously very much troubled by something in the lonely hours of the night.  He wore the haggard face of an insomniac.

     _Alone in your bed is the one place you have no defense.  Anything can come for you there, anything at all._

She put down her spoon.  She couldn't eat on a thought like that.  It struck too close to home.  She knew all about the things that could come for you in the night, the stealthy skittering things that could clamber up your bed sheets with their pittering little feet and grinning faces, the embodiment of all your sins and doubts and fears.  They had come for her a lot in the year following her friend's death.  She heard them creeping around the corners of her room, drawing closer as they whispered accusations in voices that smelled of damp rot.  Sometimes she felt their fingers tugging impishly on her sheets.  They never made it to her bed, though.  Dinks kept them away.  He saw them.  Sometimes her screams drove them away, high and shrill in the middle of the night.  Dinks had a very busy year.

     _There was no Dinks to protect him, I don't think.  He's had to fight them off all by himself for a lot of years, and they're finally catching up with him.  They'll pull him down if they can.  He can't shake them loose anymore._

     "Oi, Rebecca, would you like some porridge?"  Fred nudged her with the bowl.

     "Sure," she said, tearing her eyes away from the dark figure at the High Table.  She sighed.  "Porridge is delicious, but just once, I wish I had a bowl of Lucky Charms."

     "Lucky Charms?"

     "It's a Muggle cereal of sugared oats and marshmallow bits."

     "Doesn't sound too healthy," mused Seamus, wiping a glob of grease from his chin.

     "It isn't, but it tastes good."

     "Doesn't everything that's bad for you?"  George took a sip of tea.

     Actually, Lucky Charms had the nutritional value of a rat turd, and if you left it in milk for too long, it tasted like mushy cardboard.  She had never really liked it, but it was the only cereal her grandfather ever kept in the house, and all of this morose pontificating on the futility of life and Professor Snape's overwhelming nihilism was weighing heavily on her.  She could have used some comfort food.

     To turn her mind to lighter matters, she sneaked a peek at the Slytherin table.  There, sitting in his usual place with a sullen scowl plastered on his flawless face, was Draco Malfoy.  Her heart leapt at the sight of him.  Things had been going very badly for Mr. Malfoy of late.  Had been ever since the scalding incident five weeks ago.  Something was terribly amiss with his wand.  She swallowed laughter at the thought.

     Everyone had counted it as an accident the first time it happened.  An errant flick of the wand could happen to the best of them.  Even Professor McGonagall, while not happy, had let the matter drop.  When it had happened a second time, there had been nervous laughter.  But when it had happened a third time and then a fourth, the laughter had soured into suspicion.  At last count, it had happened twenty-one times in six weeks, and people were giving him a wide berth.

     It's not that what was happening was particularly deadly.  It was harmless.  Just embarrassing for Malfoy, which was a boon to everyone else.  Well, Malfoy and McGonagall.  No one had the audacity to laugh at McGonagall, though, not to her face.  Rebecca had nearly suffocated trying to stifle her amusement that first fateful day.  Mercifully, the rather livid professor mistook her merriment for glee at Draco's expense, and so deducted neither points nor her head from her shoulders.

     Perhaps it wasn't the nicest thing in the world to laugh at an accidentally hexed instructor, but, well, Professor McGonagall just looked damn funny in hot pink.  Every time Draco's wand went berserk, the end result was always the same.  No matter where he was in the castle, no matter what spell he cast, it always changed Professor McGonagall's robes from solid black or tartan to eye-melting pink.  McGonagall would storm down the corridor like an enraged flamingo and drag a thoroughly miserable Draco Malfoy off for a round of self-righteous brow-beating.  Life had suddenly gotten a great deal more difficult for the platinum-haired princeling, and Rebecca couldn't have been happier.

     As if he sensed her gaze, Draco raised his eyes and glared at her, his pouty lips curling in an ugly sneer.  Though his expression was full of unremitting loathing, her stomach suddenly fluttered nervously.  Damn, the boy was gorgeous, and his anger only accentuated his beauty.  His grey eyes flashed and blazed fiercely, two dots of polished mica.  His skin glowed, luminescent ivory in the light.  She felt dizzy and flushed, and warmth spread through her lower abdomen.

     _You just put the brakes on those thoughts right now.  That boy is rotten to his very core, even blacker than your Potions Master there.  No good will ever come out of him.  You steer right clear, d'you hear?_

     Everything the voice said was true, but she couldn't stop looking.  Her eyes roamed to his well-manicured, lily hands as they held the polished silver spoon and golden water goblet.  She wondered what it would be like to feel those perfect alabaster fingers caressing her cheek or trailing delicately over her lips.

     _Like cold fire.  But you'll never know that for sure, so stop moonin' about it.  You'll never catch his eye, and why would you want to?  He a soulless little bastard.  He'd chew you up and spit you out._

Yes, he undoubtedly would.  But wasn't it the bastard that you always wanted?  You never wanted the nice, unobtrusive guys, the ones that maybe didn't set the world on fire with their oozing sex appeal or blazing wit.  You never wanted the guys that just _were_, the ones going about their lives as quietly as they could, but who would die for you if you asked them to.  No, you wanted the pretty ones, the ones with caustic wit and a shark tooth smile, the ones that could satisfy your deepest yearning with the blink of an eye.  You wanted, _needed_ the ones that would crush your soul without a backward glance.

     _No secret as to why, _she thought, taking a shaky sip of pineapple juice.  Her throat no longer wanted to function.

     No, no secret there.  You wanted them because they stood out, brilliant ruby plumage in a drab sea of grey.  They were vibrant and alive and dangerous, walking on the edge of the world with a devil may care swagger.  You knew damn well that they would hurt you in the end, hurt you and leave you broken and bleeding in their wake, but you didn't care.  The fall was a million miles away, and before it came, you were going to see how high the ride could take you.

     He smirked at her, as though he knew what she was thinking.  It was a smirk that said, _Look all you want, but you'll never get any closer.  _He raised his goblet in derisive salute.  _Stupid bint_, he mouthed.

     _Fuck you, _she returned, offering him a toothy grin.  The smirk faded, and he brooded menacingly at the rest of Slytherin table to cover his discomfiture.

     _Jesus, I feel drunk.  Better get my mind on something else._

     Of their own volition, her eyes found Professor Snape again.  The heady mix of reluctant arousal and hatred faded, and the aching pall of curiosity settled over her again.  He was still scowling into his plate.  He hadn't moved since she'd come in.  Some of the food was missing from his plate, though, which meant he'd been eating.

     _He's the Invisible Man._

He was sitting at the High Table, but he might as well have been by himself for all the mind the other teachers paid him.  No one spoke to him or even glanced at him.  Occasionally McGonagall would shoot him an irritated, suspicious glare, but there was no sense of professional camaraderie between them.  Not like with the other professors.  No one engaged him in idle chatter.  Granted, he was not the sort to invite friendly gossip, but it was still rather odd.  No one even tried.  Only the Headmaster seemed to acknowledge his presence at all.  It was as though he weren't there, as though he were the white elephant in the living room.  He was tolerated, but not accepted.  He was cut off.

     _What did you do?  What disease infects you that they turn their faces away?  Look at me._

As if he had heard her, glittering black eyes met hers.  The contact was only for an instant, but she felt a jolt all the same.  The eyes that had once inspired quaking terror now filled her with terrible sadness.  They were devoid of hope, devoid of any feeling whatsoever.  They were empty of a soul.

     _No.  He's hiding it.  Hiding it behind walls thicker than even I can imagine. _ _Why?  What is it, Professor?  What lies in your vault?_

His brow creased.  He sensed her prying fingers, and she saw the doors slamming shut, saw the bars coming down.  The light in his eyes faded, and his face grew hard and expressionless.  He was shutting her out.  He scowled at her and returned his gaze to the cooling contents of his plate.  _Go away.  Leave it be._

_     All right, sir.  I'll leave it be.  For now.  _

     She returned her eyes to her cold and lumpy porridge, but her thoughts remained fixed on the silent, hopeless man sitting alone at the crowded table.


	16. In the Hall of the Mountain King

Chapter Sixteen

Dedicated to Siria Black and Chinchilla2, who set me up with my LiveJournal, and to thecurmudgeons, who has the brass to question.

     Severus Snape felt the minute pressure of her eyes on the sensitive flesh of his scalp.  It was light but insistent.  He sneered into his empty bowl.  What did she think she was doing?  Did she think that a single bout of weeping was going to open doors that hadn't seen sunlight or fresh air in nearly thirty years?  How very presumptuous, and how very wrong.  He was made of sterner stuff than that.

     He eyed her from beneath the shelter of his lank black bangs.  She wasn't looking at him anymore, not directly, but he could tell that she was still _watching_ him.  It was in the subtle shift of her eyes to the place where he sat, the considering sidelong glance.  She wasn't prying at him now.  She had temporarily called off the attack, but she was still prowling just beyond the periphery, biding her time.

     He marveled at her arrogance.  To think that she could get inside him with so little effort, with so little sacrifice.  Typical Gryffindor hauteur, he supposed.  Then again, it could be just her.  She was possessed of a stubborn streak the likes of which he had never seen.  It would be just like her to think she could winnow into his mind, to think that she could do it just because she had the jaw-dropping nerve to try.  Well, teeth-cracking bull-headedness wouldn't get you everything, and it wasn't going to get her inside his head.  Albus knew him better than anyone, and he was still trying.

     At least she had the bravado to try the direct approach.  No skulking about the unguarded corners and loosely locked cellars for her.  She was trying to come through the front door.  Whether insane or simply harboring a death wish, he could not yet tell.  But she was persistent, he'd give her that.  A broken-backed bulldog still trying to bring down its quarry.

     Not that there was any other way for her _to_ come.  He had spent his entire life building up his fortress.  He knew every hairbreadth of it, every inch of floor, every centimeter of solid stone wall.  Every door was bolted with steel locks of wariness and covered with thick chains of raw vigilance.  Every minute fissure had been scrubbed off, sealed, or shored up with layers of caustic anger.  Nothing, not even the saccharine, misplaced compassion of a twittering schoolgirl, could escape his watch.

     _There is one chink in your fortress.  He is sitting to your right, and at present, he has a dollop of grape jam in his beard._

Yes, well, he was well aware of that.  That chink had been there for a very long time, but no one else knew of it, not even Voldemort.  He had hidden it very well, covered it with layers of frost and venom.  He guarded it with his life, and if anyone tried to come through that way, he would kill them.  It didn't matter their intentions.  He would wring the life from their bodies even as his own blood ran from him if need be.

     _Well, I would hardly call her a twittering schoolgirl._

     He took a sip of cold tea and slammed the cup down with an irritable grimace, prompting an inquiring look from Albus.

     "Is everything well, Severus?"

     "Is it ever?"  He poked at his food.

     "I happen to think so," came the mild reply.

     He met this answer with ill-tempered silence, wishing Albus would leave him to his thoughts.  He was not some dithering schoolboy in need of having his every thought monitored and catalogued.  Eventually, the Headmaster's disquieting gaze returned to the scrutiny of the remnants of the buttered crumpets he so favored, and some of the tension left his shoulders.

     _In fact, Rebecca Stanhope is one of the least twittering young girls you've ever encountered,_ his mind continued, as though it had never been interrupted.

     Indeed.  She was as stiff and still as the stone gargoyles and golems that guarded this castle.  Sometimes only her eyes seemed to move, slow and watchful inside her thin-skinned skull.  They were bright and large, larger than any other feature.  They swallowed her face, twin searchlights in her pinched, pale face.  And they were constantly watching him.

     _She _sees_ me.  Really sees.  I'm not just a ghostly figure on the edges of her vision anymore.  I haven't been in quite a while.  I don't know what she sees, but she sees more than Snape the Bastard, and I don't like it at all._

     Such knowledge made him profoundly uncomfortable.  It wasn't supposed to work that way.  He was supposed to be the yellow-toothed bully, the terrorizer of unwary first-years, the lank-haired crusher of hope.  He was supposed to radiate wrath, to exude hatred like invisible plague.  He was not supposed to inspire curiosity.  He was meant to keep people out, not invite them in.  And yet Stanhope was knocking insistently on his door.

     He was partly to blame.  He had been so intent on studying her, on breaking her down into her most basic components, that he had not taken into account that she might be doing the same thing.  The endless detentions had availed her as much as they had him.  She had used her time wisely.  He had already established that she was a quick learner.  Now he saw that she was stealthy, too.  Exceptionally so.

     To have someone able to see him so frankly was dangerous.  His survival in the high-stakes game of double espionage depended on secrecy, on mystery.  On total isolation.  No ties meant no chance for betrayal, no chance for an innocent slip of the tongue to bring about total disaster.  Granted, she knew nothing, had no secrets to spill.  He was not loose-lipped in their detentions.  In fact, they did not speak at all, save for the random barked order or purred query.  But she could get them.  She was too observant not to.  He couldn't let that happen.

     _Not the first time your arrogance has gotten you into trouble._

_     Merlin, now my inner voice sounds suspiciously like Minerva._

He scowled down the table at McGonagall, wary for signs that she was using a Mind Reading Hex-fierce concentration, unnatural silence, perhaps a peculiar cock of the head.  Nothing was amiss, however.  She was polishing off the rest of her breakfast with her usual prim gusto.  He wondered irritably if she ever did anything with abandon.

     _As of late, she has savaged you at every turn with most uncouth asperity._

There was no doubt about that.  Though there had been no more shouting, no more sniveling since the hours after the scalding, the dissension between them had been growing steadily.  Any conversation was clipped and crisp, and occasionally barbs would slip from their tongues like acid spittle.  The atmosphere in the staff room had become appallingly tense.  The other professors were treading on eggshells.  Light conversation was a distant memory.  They feared that any topic, no matter how trivial, might set off another sparring match.  It had reached the point where he refused to go there at all, opting instead for the blessed privacy and solitude of his chambers.

     _Fascinating.  But none of this will get us any closer to a solution regarding Miss Stanhope and her unwelcome meddling._

He crumpled up his napkin and tossed it onto his plate with a sniff.  What to do?  It was too much to hope that she would give up the chase of her own volition.  She was too entranced by it, too captivated by the tantalizing scent of mystery.  She would pursue the trail for as long as she could, regardless of the obstacles he put in her path.  She would scrabble over all of them, he had no doubt, even if she had to risk herself to do it.  If she couldn't climb it, she would tunnel under it, and if she couldn't do that, then she was just tenacious enough, just bloody _stupid _enough, to bulldoze right through it.  

     _As bullheaded as they come, that girl.  _Then, _She's had to be, I suspect.  A matter of survival._

     _Yes, well, it's a liability now.  For her and for me.  She doesn't know what she's getting into._

_     Nor would she care.  Irritating chit._

Well, he would have to save her from her own rashness.  Her death on his conscience because she'd taken too great an interest in his affairs was the last thing he needed.  Then those bright blue eyes would never leave him, just as the expression on Albus' face the night he learned of the Potters' deaths would never leave him.  His vault of tarnished, ill-borne memories was already filled to capacity and beyond.  He didn't need another.

     The easiest thing to do would be to Obliviate her, but that was out of the question.  He was quite sure that Miss Stanhope's quiet, hawkish surveillance had begun less than a week into her stay, and if he suddenly and arbitrarily wiped out nearly seven weeks of recollection, eyebrows would be raised.  McGonagall's would reach the very crown of her head, and she would waste no time in scandalous conjecture as to what had happened.

     He suppressed a shudder at the disturbing mélange of theories she would likely concoct in her vengeance-fevered brain.  Snape the sexual predator would be the first thought to come to mind, no doubt.  While prudish in her own dealings with the stronger sex, she was quick to ascribe deviant behavior to others.  Images would whirl in her outraged mind of him ravaging the girl on the desk, or perhaps on the grime-caked floor, taking her against her will as she wept and pleaded for mercy.  It was absurd, really.  He was as attracted to Rebecca Stanhope as he was to a Flobberworm or a Hinkypunk or Hagrid in a sheer leotard.  Which was to say not at all.

     _The best course of action would be to discontinue the detention, keep her away from you.  If she can't study you, she can't see._

     The voice was absolutely right.  That was the most prudent course of action, and he should implement it at once.  He wasn't about to, though.  It would be conceding defeat, and he wasn't going to raise the white flag to a cripple and an undersexed colleague.  McGonagall would preen and strut unmercifully and prate to anyone who would listen that he had finally seen the error of his ways and was showing good sense.  Gryffindor might would triumph once again.  The thought of her smug face the first time Stanhope's name failed to appear on the disciplinary rolls made his stomach rumble uneasily, and the aftertaste of greasy sausage coated his throat.

     He could hear it now.  _Why, Severus, the milk of human kindness hasn't completely curdled in your bones, after all, _she would say with that superior it's-all-for-the-best-you-know smirk, and then she would slink away, leaving him to stare after her in frozen disgust.  Canceling detention was not on the horizon.

     _Letting your pride get in the way, are you?_

_     Sod it.  I'm not walking away from this just yet._

     Besides, if she wanted to study him, she would.  There was still class.  There was no way around that short of murdering her and hiding the body.  And his murdering days were long over, though he had enjoyed them for a time.  No, this would have to be solved another way.  He finished his breakfast in silence, always aware of a pair of inquisitive blue eyes that from time to time would drift to where he sat.  Knocking.  Forever knocking.  He set his teeth and prayed it would stop.  But he knew it wouldn't.  She would see it to the end, and part of him was glad. 

     These thoughts were still with him later that day in Potions, and she was still watching him.  To the outsider, nothing was amiss.  She was looking at him the way any student would look at any teacher-thoughtfully, attentively, and without malice-yet he knew there was more behind those eyes than friendly student interest.  He could feel her there, knocking incessantly at his fortress door.  Her eyes followed him everywhere he went, and to him they were as unpleasant and unwelcome as the dry, brittle touch of spider legs against his skin.

     He gritted his teeth.  She was relentless.  _Knock, knock.  _The tolling of funeral bells.  _Knock, knock.  Let me in, child.  I will not harm thee.  I only carry death in my arms.  Knock, knock._

     He stalked around the room, his soft, professorial voice slicing through the air effortlessly.  Every eye was trained upon him, rapt with the terror of well-known consequences should attention falter.  Except for hers.  She was watching him, make no mistake, but it was not with fear.  Her aspect was positively Dumbledorian.  She saw more than she ought.  Her intensity was staggering.  She never lost him, never broke eye contact.  Her head swiveled in eerie precision, and when he pivoted sharply on his heel with a sussurating swish of cloak, he saw her pupils contract and her mouth twitch ever so slightly.

     _What do you see?  What do you want?  Stop looking at me.  Stop _seeing _me.  _But she did not.  She kept watching him, blue eyes shimmering oddly in the torchlight.

     _I see you.  I see you, and you cannot blind me._

     He curled and uncurled his long fingers in time to the pounding of the blood in his temples.  They itched to strike out, to slap her insolent, knowing face, to cover those probing eyes.  All the while his mouth moved, giving voice to the mundane preparation of Advanced Sleeping Draught, but his mind was not there.  It was prowling his fortress, searching for weakness, for corruption in its foundation.  She was coming, he knew, and she was cunning.

     _Don't bother looking for weakness.  You know there isn't any.  You've placed every brick and mortar yourself.  She's coming through the front door.  It's the only way she knows._

_     She'll never get in.  Never.  She can knock until she flays the skin from her knuckles.  That door will hold, and I will never open it._

_     She's stubborn enough to do just that.  She'll knock until she's worn her fingers to grey bone and tough gristle.  She'll knock and knock, and the sound of wet bone against heavy wood will resonate through your fortress.  She'll knock so long that the wood will wear away, grain by grain, splinter by splinter.  First a pinprick, smaller than the foreleg of an ant.  Then, a crack just large enough to slip a fingernail through, but it will be enough.  She'll push and push, and soon enough, she'll gain a fingerhold, then a handhold.  She'll come in.  She will never stop._

_     She can pound on that door until she becomes an aged old crone and dies.  She will not win.  I am stronger.  I must be.  _

     The voice did not answer, but he could feel the doubt behind the silence, stinging and erotic as a fresh cut.  His own conscience doubted him.  No one had ever doubted his will, not even Voldemort.  The Dark Lord had often boasted of his will, calling it stronger than adamantium and crueler than the cut of a chilled diamond.  Now he himself was doubting it, and that was not to be tolerated.

     He looked at her as he paced, glanced at her with cautious, appraising eyes, shielding them behind delicate black lashes.  She was still there, still seeing, still scratching at his door with razor-thin claws.  He bit the inside of his cheek, tethering the urge to lash out, to slash her with his pitiless tongue, to see the blood run from her face and her lips tremble with that old, comfortable fear.  He needed to see it, needed to know that his world had not been turned upside down.

     He fisted his hands in the shallow pockets of his trousers to keep from kneading his temples or pinching the bridge of his nose, gestures that were becoming far too common of late.  He couldn't reprimand her; she hadn't done anything remotely worthy of rebuke, not even by his ruthless, pernicious standards.  She was being the model student, doing what she should.  Paying attention.  If he took her to task for no reason, even his Slytherins, used to his inveterate injustices, would look at him askance.  They would think he had finally cracked.

     Maybe he had.  He certainly felt cracked.  The weeks since the scalding incident had passed in a languid fever haze.  Nothing was as it should be.  The students still stared and him and sniggered behind their hands.  The Headmaster still beamed at him and patted him on the shoulder every morning, much to his annoyance.  The other teachers still moved around him, as though he were an unwelcome obstacle in an otherwise serene ocean.  Flitwick still had the audacity to treat him cordially.  Still something wasn't right.  The floor seemed less solid beneath his feet.  The walls pressed a bit closer.  He knew what it was.  He was no longer invisible, no longer _unseen._

     She was still watching him.  He could still feel the heat and weight of her eyes boring into his back.  Merlin, why didn't she stop?  He could hear himself talking, but it was unreal, unimportant.  The weight between his shoulders was the only real thing.  _Knock, knock.  Let me in, child.  I will not harm thee.  I only carry death in my arms._

     He whirled on his heel.  He had to do something.  He had to make her stop.  He couldn't stand that weight of those eyes one moment longer.  Not one.  He would do whatever it took to re-establish the barrier between them, the island of safety that had been knocked akimbo by an aberrant twitch of a terrified fist.  Anything, _anything_ to avoid that terrible scrutiny.

     _Anything?  Really?  Would you grip her shoulder again, perhaps break it this time?_

     His lips pressed into thin line, and he swallowed thickly at the memory of her fragile, birdlike bones beneath his hand.  They were so small, and with a thoughtless closing of his fingers he had nearly crushed them.  The nightmare he'd had of hearing the sickening pop of dislocating and breaking bone came back to him with awful clarity, and he snorted in self-reproach.

     No, he wouldn't do that again.  He would never lay a hand on her again.  Neither in cruelty nor in kindness would he reach for her.  Not even if his own life were endangered and she were his only hope of salvation.  She was too dangerous.  The emotions she inspired in him were too roiling and volatile.  

     There were other ways to shake her loose, to prise her iron fingers from around his mind, to turn her irrevocably from his door.  Fear still lurked beneath the respect, and maybe he could tap into it, reawaken that primal temerity of that which was more powerful, the ancient, innate mistrust of authority born into the bones and sinews of every man.  He would bring her back under his heel while there was still time.

     _Too late, too late, _his mind whispered, but he pushed it aside.

     He drew close to her desk, hovering around her like sickly carrion fowl.  She only looked up at him with those eyes, her improbable, turtle neck craning awkwardly.  He pressed in on her, crowding her space, trying to draw her into smothering claustrophobia.  Her hands remained relaxed on her armrests, and her breathing remained calm and unharried.  Clearly, she was not intimidated.  

     She was watching him speculatively, her bland, thin face blank as scoured slate.  She was as emotionless and still as ever, but the defenses that had been built tall and strong around her eyes were gone, razed into fading memory.  They were open windows, and he could gaze into them as intently as he wished.  

     _All channels standing by, sir._  She was waiting for him to act.  

     He looked down his long, crooked nose at her, and he noticed something.  She looked ill.  She never looked good, mind, but now she looked absolutely horrid.  Her skin was pale and pinched, and she sat uneasily in her chair, as though something pained her.

     _Fever, _he thought.

     Upon closer inspection, he dismissed the idea.  Her cheeks weren't flushed, nor were her eyes glittering with malaise.  Then there was the smell, a faint jungly, coppery odor, stark and vaguely unpleasant.  It took him a minute to realize what it was, and when he did, he took a step back, startled.  She continued to look up at him, unconcerned with his looming and heavy scrutiny.

     _She's menstruating._

     He felt stupid even thinking such a thing.  Of course she was.  Why shouldn't she be?  She was female, after all, albeit badly put together.  It was just that he had never considered her to have any sex at all.  She just was, a student in a robe, a human form filling up the assorted arm and head holes of her clothes.  She was not like the other girls.  She did not smell of perfume or flowers or caramelized sugar.  She didn't lavish herself with silky bows or socks.  She didn't decorate herself in bangles or spangles or paint herself in garish colors.  She exuded no femininity, gave off no sense of "womanness" at all.  She simply moved about in a female body, fading into to the drab grey of the walls like a neuter chameleon.

     That smell told a different tale, though.  It said that she was a woman for real and true, no matter how meanly constructed.  It said that she had an identity and a place beyond her name.  It said that she belonged to the mystifying, esoteric, and maddening cult of the woman.  He found that thought profoundly disconcerting.  It gave her dimension beyond the formidable target of his wrath.  She was now no longer just his bane; she was his _female_ bane, and that put things in an entirely new light.

     _Brilliant.  I'm not just a bully, now I'm a sexist pig, too.  At least I will be when this fact finally dawns on Minerva._

     That might be far into the future, luckily for him.  Minerva was hardly thrilled with her own femininity.  She bore it like a lifelong curse.  It was hardly likely that she would recognize Miss Stanhope's sexuality when she tried so very hard to disavow her own.  She was trying to become what Stanhope so effortlessly was-the invisible, androgynous chameleon unfettered by conventions of her sex.

     Not that Stanhope was terribly enthralled with the other members of the fairer sex.  Indeed, she seemed to shun them.  In all the time she had been here, he had never seen her with any of the girls in her House.  She spent most of her time with the Gryffindor boys.  Girls, apparently, were beneath her.

     Maybe she sensed that she was at a distinct disadvantage in belonging to the Venusian horde.  "Weaker sex" was a grave misnomer some fool had foisted upon women in a moment of inebriated stupidity, he was sure.  Either that, or someone so entranced with the dangling appendage between his thighs that he had willfully chosen to misunderstand.  They _were_ more emotional, more prone to hasty action when anger was upon them, but they were not weak.  Not even close.  

     They were crueler, too, than men, though it took them a bit longer to acquiesce to their sadistic wonts.  When they chose to torture, it was not motivated by any specific end-sex, revenge, information.  It was simply because they could, because the option was open to them.  That kind of power was seldom afforded to them, and when it was, they accepted it greedily.  He had once watched Agrippina Delerov eviscerate a seven-year old Muggle girl.  The girl had been fully conscious throughout, and she had screamed, a high, piercing, bubbling, wail that never seemed to end.  It ended abruptly when Agrippina deftly removed her lungs with six slices of her wand.  She had continued to gape a few minutes more before speeding toward merciful eternity.  He had killed before, killed with real pleasure, but what Agrippina had done had made him feel dizzy with horror.  He had killed from strategic necessity or from vengeance, and he had always done it quickly.  Aggrippina killed because it was in her power to do so, her right as an elite Death Eater.

     Their cruelty was not limited to bloodshed and torture.  Love, or the pursuit of it, made them crueler still.  There was nothing they would not do for it.  They would tear each other apart for the privilege of having their heart broken by the school Adonis.  He had seen countless friendships implode, ground beneath the impetuous wheels of lust.  There was nothing sacred in that kind of war, no weapon too brutal.  Trusted, precious secrets that had lain quiet in the heart of a best friend for years were suddenly exposed, dragged through the mud of expediency as they wrangled over a heart unworthy of such attention.  They would use cunning if they could, but if they couldn't, then they would simply bludgeon one another until one lay broken-backed and bleeding in the dirt.

     Stanhope had no tools to fight that sort of war.  She had no beauty, no feminine wiles.  She had nothing to offer the young men.  She was ugly, aloof, and wholly unconcerned with niceties.  She had breasts, but they were not the curvaceous, alluring sort that drew admiring eyes.  They were burlap bags filled with rocks.  No boy would give her a second glance.  Even the ugly ones would offer her no hope.  Like was not attracted to like.  That which was ugly craved beauty, to see the sunlight, feel it upon its misshapen face.  It didn't wish to hold familiar darkness.

     Perhaps she understood these things.  He thought she might.  Maybe it was a blessing to the other girls.  Had she been beautiful, even remotely, she would have crushed them all.  She was intelligent, disgustingly so, and she saw everything.  She hunkered in the shadows and dusty corners, and they never paid her any mind, but she saw them, and she plucked from them the tiniest of secrets.  She stole them from the careless happenstance of everyday conversation, and she smiled as their former owners passed heedlessly by.  She gathered them like precious ore, and had she occasion to use them, she would have done so ruthlessly.  No, the other girls had no idea how very lucky they were.

     The fact that she chose not to fight in the war of bloody hearts, however, failed to change the fact that she suffered the burden of all her kind, and he would use it to his advantage.  He would re-establish his rightful and proper dominance.  What was the old adage?  _Familiarity breeds contempt._  In this case, it had bred complacency, but he was going to fix that momentarily.

     He smirked and caressed the tip of his rapier tongue against the back of his teeth.  He would be quick, but he would not be kind.  The cut would be deep, and if he were lucky, it would reach to the core of her and sever the fledgling vine of her intrigue, of her strange empathy.  That this blow was undeserved did not trouble him.  It would serve his purpose, and when it was over, and the hatred ignited in those eyes, he would safely resume his life as the unnoticed, unloved walker of these corridors.

     He opened his mouth to ask her in his cultured nightshade voice just _what_ that noisome stink might be, but then he froze.  Their eyes locked, and his voice, his most cherished of weapons, deserted him.  Until the day he died, he was never certain if what happened next was a dream, a hallucination brought on by stress, a vision, or real, but he never forgot it.  The classroom disappeared, there was blackness, and then…

     _He found himself standing in the middle of a long stone corridor, the floor solid and gritty under his feet.  On either side stretched heavy oak doors as far as the eye could see, golden doorknobs jutting from them in gleaming invitation.  He stepped toward one, intent on investigating it, but before he could take more than a half-step, the world was filled with a dull, thudding boom.  Boom.  Boom.  Boom._

     The sound filled his skull, crowding his brain, making it vibrate.  His teeth rattled and throbbed, and his eardrums bulged dangerously.  Boom.  Boom.  Boom.  He clamped his hands over his ears, desperate to shut it out, but it was useless.  Boom.  Boom.  Boom.  Dust rained from the ceiling in a fine grey mist.  He heard the doors groan on their hinges.  Boom.  Boom.  Boom.  The world was ending.

     _He staggered down the corridor, weaving drunkenly.  The floor shook beneath his feet, sending tingling shockwaves through his calves and into his thighs.  Boom.  Boom.  Boom.  Merciful Fates, it wouldn't stop.  He clenched his teeth, feeling some of the enamel scrape away.  Any moment now, the top of his skull was going to explode.  He felt wetness on his upper lip.  Sweat, or maybe blood.  Wetness on his cheeks.  Tears.  He was weeping from the pain.  Boom.  Boom.  Boom._

_     The sound nearly drove him to his knees.  He lurched onward, digging his fingers into the black mat of his hair.  At the end of the corridor was a corner, and he swerved around it, praying there would be an escape from the monstrous noise, but it only grew louder.  He tried to turn from it, to flee, but his legs refused his command.  They were paralyzed by the force of the sound.  They scissored forward, stiff and ungainly.  Boom.  Boom.   Boom.  The force was like a physical blow, and he reeled._

_     The doors never seemed to end.  On and on they coiled, around corners, spanning T-sections and Y-junctions.  They rattled in their frames with every explosive boom.  He staggered past them, and when his shuddering knees failed him, he crawled past them, his fingernails digging into the floor.  Boom.  Boom.  Boom.  It was as though a petulant giant-child was trying to pound the place into rubble._

_     He crawled on.  Boom.  Boom.  Boom.  The sound was a terrible agony now.  It punched into his chest and stomach like a mallet.  His stomach knotted, and he retched, sending yellow bile down the front of his robes.  Boom.  Boom.  Boom.  He was going to have a heart attack.  The sound was crushing his spine.  He cried out.  This was a thousand times worse than Cruciatus.  Boom.  Boom.  Boom._

_     He stopped.  He couldn't go on.  If he drew any closer to the sound, it would kill him.  It would rattle him to pieces.  He collapsed, curling into the fetal position and pressing his palms into his ears.  Boom.  Boom.  Boom.  The sound was bigger than the universe.  It had to be shaking the stars from the firmament and displacing the foundations of the earth._

_     The world spun.  Blackness was coming for him, and this time he would not emerge into the light.  It was going to swallow him.  He closed his eyes.  Better not to see his end.  Then he heard the voice.  He shouldn't have been able to hear it.  The unholy cacophony should have drowned it out.  But there it was, soft as benediction beneath the pounding._

    "Professor."  Boom.  Boom.  Boom.  "Professor."

     _He lay on the floor, incredulous even in his agony.  He recognized that voice.  Quiet, but hard as steel.  Stanhope.  Understanding dawned, and he rolled onto his stomach and began to claw himself toward the end of the corridor.  He knew she would be waiting there.  He pulled, and the flesh beneath his fingernails tore.  He kept going.  He was determined to reach the end.  Blood dotted his wake._

_     He was furious.  She had no right to be here.  He knew what this place was now.  It was his fortress.  It was his sanctuary, and she was outside, demanding entry.  He screamed behind his teeth.  By the gods, his brains must be leaking from his ears.  He would drive her away from here.  He had to.  He would die if he didn't.  How she'd gotten here he didn't know, nor did he know how he'd managed to get inside his own head, but if the knocking didn't end he was going to die trapped in his own mind._

_     Boom.  Boom.  Boom.  "Stop!" he screamed.  "Stop, damn you!"_

_     His raw fingers scraped the bottom of a door.  He forced himself to his knees and rested his face against the cool wood.  He breath was harsh and ragged.  He swallowed, throat clicking.  If he didn't say something right now, the next thud would shatter him.  He would be little more than a skin sack of powdered bone._

_     "Miss Stanhope," he croaked._

_     The pounding ceased.  Complete silence settled over him.  It was not empty silence, though.  It was expectant.  He was not alone._

_     Scraping.  Shuffling.  The clittering of long fingernails over the wood of the door.  "Professor?"_

_     The sound of those fingernails across the door was so repulsive that he shuddered.  He sagged against the door, grateful for the quiet.  "What do you want, Miss Stanhope?"  His voice was unsteady and weak._

_     More shuffling.  "I need to see."_

_     He snorted.  "What is it you need to see?"_

_     More silence, heavy and considering.  "I don't know, sir.  I just know I need to see."_

_     "Why is that?  Do you think you can save me?"  Now that the dreadful pounding had stopped, his strength was returning rapidly._

_     This time the silence was so long that he was sure she had gone away.  Then, "No, sir, I don't think so.  I don't think anyone can, but I knew I had to come."_

_     "Forthright even here," he muttered.  "Go away.  I don't want you here."_

_     "I can't.  I have to see.  There isn't much time."_

_     "Time for what?" he snarled._

_     "I don't know, sir."  The clittering sounded from behind the door again, a cold, eager sound, and Stanhope whimpered.  There was a shuffling sound again._

_     Something occurred to him then.  She couldn't shuffle.  As far as he knew, she had never felt the earth beneath her feet.  "Go away, whoever you are.  I don't need you."_

_     "Sir?"  Honest confusion.  "It's me, Rebecca Stanhope."_

_     "You can't be.  Miss Stanhope cannot stand, and _you_ most certainly are," he hissed, triumphant in thwarting the ruse.  "And even if you were the meddlesome Miss Stanhope, it would make no difference.  Go away.  Now."_

_     So quietly he almost didn't hear it.  Oh, _that._"  She sounded amused.  "I don't need that here."_

_     "Why not?"_

_     "Because this isn't."_

_     "What are you going on about?"_

_     "Open the door, sir.  I need to see."  The clittering again._

_     "No."_

_     "Please.  There isn't much time."_

_     He found himself reaching for the iron bolt that locked the door, a bolt covered with decades of rust.  He wanted to see her.  He wanted to see what she looked like on her feet.  His fingers wrapped around the bar.  A thought flitted across his mind.  Let me in, child.  I will not harm thee.  I only carry death in my arms.  He paused for but a moment.  The need to see her was too strong.  He opened the door, wincing at the scream of unused hinges._

_     "Don't come in," he said before the door was even half-open._

_     She stood in the threshold, and he gaped at her.  She was small, little over five feet tall, and pitifully thin.  She was still homely, but the blight of illness and deformity no longer touched her.  Her knees and elbows were straight, and there was a healthy flush to her cheeks.  Her eyes were alive with vigor, and her hair was a glowing crown of sunfire._

_     The scars from all her surgical procedures were still there, though.  They crisscrossed her legs in a pale pink latticework.  She smiled when she saw the path his eyes took._

_     "Never get rid of those, I'm afraid."_

_     "Why not?"_

_     "I thought you would have guessed.  May I come in?"_

_     "No."_

_     She inclined her head in respect.  "There isn't much time."_

_     "Why do you keep saying that?" he spat._

_     She opened her mouth to answer, and the clittering sound came, sharp and far too close.  Her smile faded, and terror crept into her face.  Her eyes grew large, and her lips trembled.  A wind stirred her hair, carrying the faint smell of blood.  Another clitter, and this time he saw a movement._

_     So did she, and she looked fearfully over her shoulder.  Her chest began to hitch.  "They're coming for you, sir!  There isn't much time."  She stepped in and grasped the doorhandle.  "For God's sake throw the bolt!  Don't let them in!  They're coming!"  And with that she slammed the door._

_     He stepped back_

And felt the hard edge of a desk in his left buttock.  He was back in the classroom again.  Miss Stanhope was still in front of him, and she looked like he felt.  Her face was the color of skim milk, and her eyes were glassy and stunned.  They stared at one another, their breathing and the occasional burp of boiling potion the only sound in the otherwise tomb-like silence.

     _What was that?  Mother Demeter, what happened?_

He saw the same question in her face, the same bewilderment, but he also saw something else, a furtive flicker of recollection.  He needed to sit down.  His head was spinning, and his stomach seemed to have been left behind, but he had never taught a class sitting down, and he was damned if he was going to make an exception.  His mouth felt like chalk.

     The rest of the class was staring at them, their cauldrons forgotten.  Draco was watching them with his strange silver eyes, his creamy brow creased slightly, long fingers beneath his chin.  He knew that look.  It was the look young Mr. Malfoy got when puzzling over a particularly troublesome or intriguing idea.  The hollow where his stomach had been lurched.  The last thing he needed was Malfoy taking an interest in his Potions Master's odd conduct.  While he was no threat, Malfoy Senior certainly was.

     "Miss Stanhope, I'll need to see you after class," he managed, and moved away from her as quickly as he could without arousing suspicion.

     Hera, he needed a drink.  Something decidedly stronger than pumpkin juice.  Ogden's Old Firewhiskey, maybe.  As a general rule, he rarely partook of spirits, and then never in times of crisis.  That was the road to ruin, and while he was quite comfortable being a bastard, he absolutely refused to be a tosspot.  The feeling was going to have to pass on its own, though he suspected it was going to be a long, long time before it did.

     He paced his domain on legs that felt like stilts.  Though he knew he was back on terra firma, he still felt mad.  His legs didn't seem to belong to him anymore, and his mouth tasted of talc.  His heart was fluttering oddly in his chest, and there was the unfamiliar sensation of sweat on his palm.  More than once he considered going up to his lectern and leaning on it, but he never did.  He continued on, just as he always had.

     He watched Stanhope from the corner of his eye, and it took less than a second to see that she was in as bad shape as he was.  Her eyes were round as dinnerplates inside her bleached face, and as he watched, her cutting knife jumped and clattered on the desk.  The sound it made reminded him of the strange clittering outside his fortress door, and he flinched.  The cauldron rattled as she dropped her ingredients inside.

     For once he wished she would stop trying.  He almost ordered her to stop, but didn't.  He didn't want to show leniency, and if he did, Draco would assuredly file that away for his next report to father dearest.  She continued to toil, fighting the shakes and the dizzying confusion as best she could.  Her trembling upper lip curled as she rallied her internal forces to keep up the attack.

     _Stop, you stupid girl, just stop!  The potion doesn't matter.  You're failing this class, and nothing you can do will change that.  Stop._

_     She won't.  You've taught her too well.  This isn't about Potions marks.  It never really has been._

     It was laughable.  His attempts to break her had failed.  All he had done was goad her into this ferocious battle of wills, and rather than folding quickly, as he had expected, she was holding her own.  In some instances, she was doing better than that.  Like now.  She was trudging along trenchantly when she should have been falling apart.  It was stupefying.

He saw Draco watching her with a malevolent grin.  He could almost hear the wheels inside that platinum head turning.  If he scared Stanhope, he was going to find himself in very grave trouble.  In her present state, she was likely to accidentally stab someone.  

     "Not today, Mr. Malfoy," he hissed, taking a step forward.

     Draco's head snapped around, his eyes wide with surprise.

     _Of course I saw you, you little prat_, he thought with wry amusement.

     Draco stared at him in disbelief.  _Sir? _he mouthed.

     He only jerked his head brusquely and resumed his pacing.  Forethought was not one of the younger Malfoy's virtues.  Such a lack was strange, really; his father had it in spades.  It was his best trait, actually.  Lucius planned things precisely, down to the smallest detail.  He planned for every contingency.  Such things made him indispensable to Voldemort.  It would ensure his life at least until the Dark Lord assumed power.  After that, it would make him a liability.

     That was the one thing Lucius _didn't _see.  Lucius was quite convinced that Death was never going to come for him.  People like him didn't die.  Dying was so gauche.  Dying was for Muggles and Mudbloods and Purebloods not rich enough to pay Death off, and Lucius was none of those things.  Hence, he was going to live forever.  That his master might kill his most useful puppet had never crossed his mind.  Death was going to come as quite a shock to him.

     These musings helped settle his nerves, and when he was sure he could speak without sounding like a hoarse mongoose, he went to his lectern.  The class grew still, and he sneered at them.  He had been looking forward to this announcement all week.  The thought of it cheered him considerably.

     "As usual, most of you performed abysmally, but the potion must be tested.  After much thought, I have decided that Mr. Potter will be the test subject."  He fixed the sputtering Potter threesome with a triumphant smirk.  Weasley was nearly apoplectic, and Hermione was staring at him in prim disapproval.  The day was looking better.

     He did not fail to notice the twin smiles of dripping contempt on two very disparate faces.  He wondered if they knew just how alike they looked now.  Probably not.  The very notion of such similarity would send them both scrabbling for their wands.  But they were twins in their hatred of the blessed Potter.  Their faces shone with it.  The light of it made Stanhope nearly beautiful.  Two set of perfect fangs dripped sweet venom onto the floor.  They were a terrible Gemini to behold.

     When the rest of the students were gone, Stanhope rolled to the front of his desk and waited.  She was still shaking, the tremors running through her body like muted lightning.  Her fingers tapped staccato on the armrests.

     "Are you all right, Miss Stanhope?"

     "I don't know, sir."

     He had intended to ask her what had happened, but he suddenly decided he didn't want to know.  She might very well tell him, and he didn't think he could handle such bald honesty at the moment.  "You look terrible.  See Madam Pomfrey," he said shortly.  He needed to be alone.

     "Yes, sir," she said, but the look in her eyes suggested she would rather be dragged through Borgergup dung.  Truthfully, he didn't blame her.

     When she was gone and the sound of her chair had faded, he sat down behind his desk and trembled for a very long time.        


	17. Teacup Confessions

Chapter Seventeen

     By the time Rebecca rolled into the Halloween Feast, she felt horrible.  The cramps had been building all day, and now they were a heavy weight in her lower abdomen, making her sluggish and sick.  Her head was pounding with a dull ache.  Her scalp felt bruised and stretched, and her tongue tasted faintly of rice paper.  Food was the last thing on her mind, but she was going anyway.  All week the students had been buzzing about the Feast, and she didn't want to miss it.

     Not all of her malaise could be attributed to her period, she knew.  Ever since the…whatever it was in Potions, her bones had seemed too light, scraped hollow, and the skin of her arms felt prickly and hot.  Confusion whirled in her brain like dirty sleet, and the more she tried to make sense of it, the more bewildered she became.  Thinking about it sharpened the throbbing of her head, but she couldn't stop trying to decipher the riddle.  She kept tugging at it, nibbling at it with tiny, pointed teeth of curiosity.

     The trouble was that she couldn't remember.  The forgetting of it had begun as soon as it ended.  For a few seconds, everything had been so clear, emblazoned on the acetate of memory, but then the edges had begun to blur.  The colors had run together, and the voices had grown tinny and weak, the voices from an ancient gramophone.  Over the hours, it had receded into only the barest recollection that tickled the base of her brain persistently.  It had been important, she felt that deep in her bones, but when she reached for it, it slipped through her fingers like the silvery wisps of tainted Pensieve.

     Why couldn't she remember?  Her memory was an iron trap.  She still remembered every phone number she had ever had since childhood, every teacher and the subject they taught, and the name of every enemy she had ever made, and there had been a lot of them.  But something that had happened a little over five hours ago was lost to her.  It was a wall of white noise.  Disconnected thoughts and phrases would surface only to be lost in the endless roaring blankness.

     _(not much time)_

_     (open the door)_

_      (no)_

_     (go away)_

_     (Do you think you can save me)_

_     (-don't know-)_

_     (door)_

_     (coming for you)_

_     (coming for)_

_     (coming)_

Something danced on the tips of her groping fingers, feather light and fleeting as a blown kiss.  She reached for it, stretching the formidable will of her mind, but it danced out of reach, disappearing into the vast white wall that kept her from her thoughts.  She gave up the chase and let her neck and shoulders relax.  The pain in her head eased a trifle, and she took a deep breath.

     She had been somewhere.  It most certainly had not been the Potions classroom.  It had been huge, monolithic, reaching into a black, roiling sky, stabbing victoriously through torpid air that stunk of ozone.  A cathedral?  She didn't know.  An iron gargoyle flashed across her vision, its twisted visage leering at her with bloody, ragged fangs.  Frozen iron brushing her fingers, and then the splintery, pocked feel of old wood.  Low vibration in her knuckles.  She had been knocking.  She had wanted in.  But why?

     Someone had been on the other side of the door.  She had heard them, faintly and far away.  She had known them.  She had been frightened, too, terrified, in fact.  Her bladder had been shrunken and tight, an over-saturated raisin.  She hadn't feared the voice, not that she could remember.  She had been afraid _for _it.  Something terrible was coming, and it was vindictive and cold, and it was hungry.  She had wanted to run, but she hadn't.  She had continued to knock.

     A sound echoed in her mind, and she instinctively shrank from it.  Clittering.  Pebbles tumbling over a precipice.  The coy approach of slinking annihilation.  That had been a part of it, too.  The worst part maybe.  What had made the sound?  No, that was a blank.  Too many pieces of the tableau were missing, swathes of grey amidst the vivid color.

     _Let me in, child.  I will not harm thee.  I only carry death in my arms._

     Blood.  Blood on the wind.  Harbinger of lives spent.  Her arm jerked, sending her fork screaming across the edge of the golden plate.  _Let me in, child.  I will not harm thee.  I only carry death in my arms.  _Soft.  Lyrical.  Damnation's lullaby.  Most certainly not her own thought.  

     "What?' she whispered, the muscles of her chest suddenly too loose to put any force behind her words.

     Someone nudged her in the shoulder.  "You feeling all right?"  George eyed her dubiously, fork dangling loosely from his hand.  "You look a bit off color."

     "Oh, I'm brilliant."  She tittered.  She felt irredeemably insane.  She stabbed at her sliced ham with an unsteady fork.  It took three tries before the tines struck home.  The room seemed overbright.

     "Maybe you should see-,"

     "If you tell me to see Madam Pomfrey, I'll hex you."  She was absolutely serious.  Madam Pomfrey couldn't fix this.

     He must have seen the sincerity in her face.  He raised a conciliatory hand.  "All right.  No need to get upset."

     "Tell me about Quidditch," she said, changing the subject in the hopes of returning her mind to an even keel.

     Fred and George brightened.  Quidditch started this weekend, and it was all they had talked about for weeks.  Most of their free time had been spent in practice on the Quidditch pitch, and they returned to the Common Room with sweat-slicked robes and grins of delirious joy upon their faces.  Nor were they the only ones.  The entire team was gregarious, often loud and raucous late into the night.  Other times, they could be seen huddled by the hearth, heads bent in solemn, whispered conference.  Quidditch fever.

     "I think we've got a smashing chance at the Quidditch Cup this year," Fred said through a mouthful of whipped potatoes.

     "Of course we do.  Our strategies are first-rate.  Harry's a whiz.  Bloody good captain."  George beamed down the table at the oblivious object of his praise.

     "And a wicked Seeker."

     Rebecca snorted.  This lavish praise of the sacrosanct Potter was eroding her appetite.  

     "What?" George asked, smiling uncertainly.

     "Harry isn't the only member of the team, you know."

     "Of course not.  But he _is_ the youngest Seeker in a century," said Fred.

     "Wonder how he came by that," she murmured, fighting not to roll her eyes.  The pointless gushing was irritating as hell.

     "Harry's not a bad sort."  George buttered his bread and gave her a knowing, indulgent smile.

     "Never said he was."  She hid her rising contempt beneath a veneer of casual observation.  "Pass the stuffing, please."

     The bowl of steaming food was pushed in front of her, and she smiled her thanks.  It was useless discussing Potter with any semblance of rationality or logic.  He held everyone here in his thrall, even Fred and George.  He was the resident deity.  No Christ-child here, no; here reigned the Potter-child, holy infant so tender and mild.  Savior of civilization.  Every knee to him shall bow, and heretics shall be consigned to the purgatory of Slytherin.  In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Patronus, amen.

     She shoveled a forkful of potatoes in her mouth and surveyed him from the safety of her silence.  He did not notice her gaze, did not feel the searching heat of her eyes.  He was too busy reveling in the adulation of his favorite sycophants.  He was never without them.  They followed in his glowing wake like doomed lemmings, clinging to the perfumed hope he exuded from his exalted pores like holy water.  They were convinced of his sanctity with the fevered, exhilarated surety of the zealot.  Anyone who ventured to speculate that he might be mere flesh and blood and unworthy of such idolatry would be turned to a cinder beneath the indignant heat of their wands.

     They were the deacons in the Church of Harry Potter, and the rest of Gryffindor House was the congregation.  They knelt at his altar daily.  He was their living icon.  The same fervor was in every eye in varying degrees.  "Harry Potter" was a benediction, and it was said with the same tone of reverential awe that people in the Muggle world reserved for the Pope.  They basked in the honor of living and breathing with sainthood incarnate.

     Though they were the worst afflicted, they were by no means the only ones.  Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw, too, had come under his sway, though his prestige among the former had waned considerably since the death of Cedric Diggory.  He had been one of them, and whether or not Potter had intended such a fate for him, he had been lost simply because he had happened to be sharing the same patch of dirt as living perfection.  The strong young god had failed to save one of his flock, and so, for the Hufflepuff, Potter had lost much of his luster.  They did not hate him-he was still _Potter_, after all-but the light of adulation did not burn so brilliantly in their eyes.

     Even the professors had been touched by the myth of Harry Potter.  McGonagall, tough as tempered nails with the rest of the Gryffindors, was quite content to look the other way as far as he was concerned, at least when it came to Quidditch.  Too young according to the rules?  No obstacle there.  Bend the rule, trample it underfoot if need be.  What were a thousand years of long-standing tradition when compared to a chance to regain lost ground on the Quidditch pitch?  A trifle.  First-years not allowed their own brooms?  Who cares?  A state-of-the-art broom shall be his.  Such a hard life, poor boy.  Why shouldn't he have a few forbidden delights?

     She had heard all the stories.  They were Hogwarts lore, and inexplicably, a source of profound pride for the House.  The older students passed them on to the younger with gleeful relish, as though sharing a particularly cherished hearth tale.  She found it odd that a House that loved to trumpet its virtues of bravery, honor, and supposed willingness to earn respect through sacrifice and toil should count the bestowing of undeserved honor upon a boy known then only for his staggering good fortune in not being killed alongside his parents as an achievement to be remembered.  It carried with it the fishy, oily reek of favoritism, of the principle of doing whatever it took to get ahead.  From her vantage point, it bore a more than striking resemblance to the litany of Slytherin's sins.

     _Tell that to old McGonagall.  See how much hide you have left after she exhausts her tongue and her breath tryin' to convince you of the error of your ways._

     No thank you.  The less she saw and heard of the old crone the better.  Her very breath was contaminated with the blighted honeysuckle whiff of self-righteous sanctimony.  Her skin probably crawled with it.  If she were ever foolhardy enough to express the secret thoughts of her heart regarding Harry Potter, she had little doubt that she would soon find herself publicly marked as outcast.  The exclusion and "otherness" would no longer be unspoken.  They would cut her off with silent synchronicity, the act as subtle but unmistakable as the clicking of one thousand turning locks.  She would be an outsider in her own Common Room, lumped it with the likes of Slytherin.

     Slytherin.  She took a long drink of water to wash the bread from her teeth and considered them.  The pariah House, the House that wealth and treachery built.  They were the only House able to resist the siren song of Potterism.  They had their reasons, to be sure, none of them noble.  Some hated him because he represented the failure of their fathers and their fathers' master.  He had taken from them and from their lines the glory of absolute victory.  As long as he went on breathing, their faith in the Dark Lord could not be wholly justified.  Some hated him as a symbol of rebellion, as a war cry against the society that looked down their noses at them because they dwelt in the House of darkness and cunning and voracious ambition.  Still others hated him because they were too stupid to think for themselves, hated with the vapid eagerness of bovine followers of the masses.  And one, Draco Malfoy to be precise, hated him with all the marrow in his bones.

     She couldn't be sure, but she thought she had a good guess as to why.  Draco Malfoy was a child of privilege, a product of untold centuries of refined and carefully selected breeding, the glorious progeny of flawless bloodlines and alliances meticulously forged.  As such, wealth, rank, and all the trappings thereof were his by right.  He was entitled to praise and flattery because the blood coursing through his veins said so.  They were as much a part of his inheritance as the mountains of gleaming Galleons in his family's vault.

     And yet, for all of that, for the purity of his blood and the riches heaped inside a cold, lightless vault, he was denied what he most expected, what life had taught him _to _expect.  Neither blood nor money could buy him the respect and adoration cast at the feet of Harry Potter like rose petals cast before the feet of a king.  He could not force words of praise from their mouths or ignite the embers of awe and loyalty in their watching eyes.  He could only stand aside, silent and furious, as an orphaned boy with one-tenth of his wealth and none of his pedigree took everything he knew to be his, and for that he despised him.  He would never _not_ despise him.  Should Potter rescue him from certain death, Malfoy would still seek opportunities to plunge the gilded silver knife into exposed and unsuspecting flesh, and he would smile when he felt it strike home.  Like him, like his blood, his hatred was pure, strong, and intoxicatingly beautiful.  She could only hope that his hatred of her was as perfect.  If she was to be hated, she wanted to be hated well.

     _Strange.  As much as everyone adores him and flaunts him as a human trophy, as much as they watch his every move, they must not look very closely._

     Harry looked strained.  He was happy enough; he was laughing and talking with Ron Weasley, but there were faint lines around his eyes, fragile crow's feet encircling those brilliant green eyes.  He was pale, too, blue-veined milk.  Even his lips were light, faded pink rather than the rosebud red of youth.  A quick glance at his plate, and she knew he hadn't eaten much.  A bite here, a bite there, and the rest pushed around to disguise his lack of appetite.

     His friends didn't notice anything amiss, and she was not terribly surprised.  They were so sure of his indestructibility.  Harry Potter couldn't possibly get sick.  He had defeated the greatest evil in the known world.  Surely nothing so mundane as illness could touch him, much less fell him.  Besides, it was easy to ignore.  Harry was quiet, Harry was retiring, and Harry never complained.  Besides, heroes never needed help, never needed a respite from toil.  That he might falter was inconceivable.

     It was his own damn fault, partly.  He was more than content to perpetuate that myth.  He was always willing to make the sacrifice, always ready to uphold Gryffindor honor.  He did it all-school, Quidditch, defense of the entire wizarding world, heroic, perfect friend-with nary a whimper of protest.  He carried all these burdens alone, and he would rather chew off his own leg than admit a task was beyond him.

     _One of these days, the little pissant is going to reach too far, and the fall will be spectacular._

     Looking at Potter was stirring her fathomless sea of resentments, so she turned her mind to the decorations in the Hall.  They were far beyond anything she had ever beheld, and seeing them loosened the rock-solid ball of tension in her chest.  She felt five-years old again, full of wonder and inexplicable delight.  The warm thrum of unbridled magic vibrated in her bones, just as it had the first time she had set foot in this room.  The feeling of it coursing through her veins and beneath her skin was exhilarating.  She let her head fall back and gazed at the enchanted ceiling high above.

The enchanted candles hovered in their places, eternal flames flickering and dancing merrily.  Someone, McGonagall most likely, had changed them from pristine white to orange and black.  Pumpkins had joined them tonight, bobbing gently.  One the size of a watermelon floated directly above her head.  Live bats wheeled overhead, their leathery wings making a sound like gently shifted parchment as they parted the air.  

     "Hey, George," she called, still watching the fluttering creatures as they glided through the maze of candles and pumpkins.

     "Yeah?"

     "D'you think a bat has ever shit in our food?"

     "What?" he guffawed, nearly spitting pumpkin juice onto the tablecloth.

     "Well, they are alive, aren't they?  They must have to go sometime."

     "Sure, they're alive, but they wouldn't go in our food."

     "Why not?  I highly doubt they're toilet-trained."

     "No, but Headmaster Dumbledore must have put an anti-poop Charm on our food or something."  Though he was trying to sound unconcerned, she noted that his eyes traveled surreptitiously to his plate.

     She sniggered at the thought of regal Headmaster Dumbledore performing an incantation to ward off bat shit.  He certainly could, but it seemed such a menial thing for him to do.  He must have a thousand other things to do in the course of keeping the school running smoothly.  Keeping bat crap out of the school food supply was probably a task relegated to someone a bit lower on the administrative totem pole.  Professor Flitwick was the Charms teacher, so maybe it fell to him.

     "An anti-poop Charm?  What could that possibly be?" she asked.  _And where was it when Judith Pruitt was around? _she thought, and immediately felt a sharp stab of guilt as Judith's lonely, bloated face tried to push its way into her mind.

     George thought for a moment.  "_Fendi Merda?"_  He took a contemplative bite of ham, remembered the subject they were discussing, and put his fork down gingerly.

     "Hmm, maybe."  She jerked her napkin unsteadily across her lips.  "Bit crass, isn't it?"

     "I suppose.  But a spell doesn't have to be fancy.  It just has to work," he pointed out.

     "_Fendi Excrementum?" _offered Dean Thomas, leaning over his plate to peer down the table.

     Yes, that sounded a bit more formal, more in line with acceptable school material.  She couldn't imagine any teacher willingly uttering the word "merda" in any context, not even in the name of keeping foodstuffs safe.  Not even Filch, the grottiest, greasiest, crudest member of the staff.  In fact, now that she thought about it, protecting the food from bat turds was something that would fit nicely under Filch's job description.  Too bad she had never seen him use magic, not even a simple cleaning spell.  He would have loved the opportunity to spew forth curse words without reprisal.

     "Who would put on a Charm like that?' she mused.

     "Flitwick would be the natural choice," said Seamus.  "Bet he'd make it good and strong."  He took a hearty sip of pumpkin juice.

     "What if someone different does it every year?" pondered Fred.  "You know, sort of a Mangiest Git of the Year Award?"

     "If that's the case, then there wouldn't be much of a rotation," observed George.  "A certain Slytherin would win every year, hands down."

     There was a low murmur of agreement.  Neville suddenly looked very uncomfortable.  "You don't suppose he did it this year, do you?"  He was surveying the food he had heretofore been gobbling with sinking horror.

     She knew what he was thinking.  The same thought was dawning on several other faces at the table.  If Professor Snape were the one responsible for guarding the food and tables from an aerial assault, then the odds were very good that they had ingested a healthy dose of phosphates with their evening meal.  A dozen minds played host to the disquieting image of him standing before the empty Gryffindor table and smiling down at the empty, unprotected plates as he passed them without granting them the protection of two simple words.  A collective shudder rippled through them.

     Burgeoning respect for Professor Snape aside, she knew such speculations were not wholly outside the realm of reason.  His loathing of Gryffindor was well-known, and he would find grim humor in the idea of oblivious, self-assured students shoveling down mouthful after mouthful of the substance that they so carelessly heaped upon him and his House with words and with glances.  As far as he was concerned, they heaved it at him with every breath, and she suspected that he would delight very much in knowing that, in some small, unknown way, he had quietly avenged himself.

     It would never happen, of course.  Despite the suppositions of her Housemates, Professor Snape was not the kind of man to leave a job undone, and if the Headmaster ever asked him to charm the tables against bat guano, then he would.  All of them.  He might grumble and mutter as he cast the spell over the Gryffindor table, but he would do it.  Whether or not he did it with a joyful heart was beside the point.  To do anything less would be an insult to both his pride and the Headmaster's trust, and she knew intuitively that he would never do anything to harm either one of those things.

     Poor Neville was unaware of any of these musings, and she suspected he wouldn't care were he informed of them.  He knew all he needed to know about Professor Snape from five long years of dealing with his scalding tongue and pitiless heart.  If she started prattling on about honor and integrity and associated those two fine words with sallow, venomous Professor Snape, Neville would look at her as though she'd grown a second head.  Nor would he be the only one.  The rest of the table would silently place her dossier in the mental filing cabinet marked _Barking Mad_.

     So instead of endeavoring to enlighten him on the redeemable qualities of one Professor Snape, she simply said, "Maybe none of the teachers do it.  Maybe the house elves do it before they send the food up."

     "You think so?"  Some of the color had returned to Neville's cheeks.

     "Sure.  They're powerful enough, and they'd do anything to make sure their masters were happy.  That and they have too much pride in their work to let it be ruined when they could very easily prevent it."

     Everyone looked pleased and not a little relieved with that theory.  House elves, insofar as everyone knew, harbored no prejudices, and therefore had no reason to contaminate the food supply.  Everyone, that was, except Hermione Granger.  She was sitting at the table with her lips pressed in a thin, disapproving line.

     "House elves are asked to do far too much, and we don't even pay them for it," she declared.

     "They don't seem to mind," Rebecca said mildly.

     "Of course they don't.  They don't know any better.  They're operating under thousands of years of mental conditioning."  Hermione was wagging her fork fiercely.

     "Some of them are, yes," she agreed, "but the ones here seem quite happy."

     "So if the slavery is kind, then it isn't wrong?"  Hermione was getting strident now.

     "I didn't say that."  She stifled a groan.  This reminded her far too much of the race debates in the Muggle world.  They started out peaceably and sanely, but soon enough they degenerated into accusations and name-calling.  The issue was far too personal, and so was this one.  She should just shut up right now.  "I just think that if they're happy working, we should leave them to it."

     Hermione bristled.  "They'd be happier paid."

     "Have they said so?"

     "Er, well, no…but that's because they've never known any other way," she persisted adamantly.

     "And being paid is better?"

     "Yes."

     "Why?"

     "Every creature should be rewarded for their work."

     "They are rewarded.  Haven't you seen their faces?  They _love_ what they do."

     "They deserve more."

     "Who says they want more?  Do any of the Hogwarts elves get paid?"

     "Yes, one.  A Galleon a week from Headmaster Dumbledore.  He's quite proud."

     "What about the others?  Did they ask for the same?"

     "No."

     "But they were given the opportunity to ask?"

     "I suppose."

     Well, then, there you have it.  If they don't want it, you can't force it upon them."

     "They would if they understood what they were missing, what they were being deprived of."

     "If they could be shown the error of their ways, you mean."

     "Yes.  No."

     "Brainwashing.  Imposing your will on them because _you_ think it's better.  Not because it's what they want.  Remarkably obnoxious thought."

     Hermione turned a bright crimson.  "Do you honestly think Winky enjoys everything she does for you?"

     "I honestly don't know, but she's never complained.  If she did, I wouldn't make her do it."

     "She deserves to get paid for all that she does for you."

     "Maybe so.  You'd have to take that up with Dumbledore."

     It might have ended there, but Hermione, for reasons unknown, added one last thought.  "Poor thing.  Not even a day off.  She's working far too hard, taking too much on."

     "That's not my fault."

     "Surely you could do a bit more for yourself?"

     Rebecca put her goblet down very slowly.  Ice and acid were seeping through her veins.  She looked at Hermione, sitting in her chair and looking back at her with her analytical gaze, fingers interlaced atop the table.  She saw shine of health in her face and the smooth perfection of her limbs.  She saw her grace of movement when she took a bite of treacle.  She caught a whiff of her confidence as she sat beside the Golden Child, and something inside her snapped.  Fangs gleamed in the darkness of her mind, and she shivered as she felt the trickle of venom in her throat.  She backed her chair away from the table.

     "Rebecca," George said uneasily.

     "No worries," she said, but her voice was low and dark.

     She rolled her chair to where Hermione sat and positioned it so that they were nearly knee to knee.  "Is that so, Hermione?"

     "Yes," she said forthrightly.  She wasn't going to back down easily.  Good.  She hated cowards.

     "What would you know about it?  Hmm?  You don't know me.  You don't know what my life is.  How could you, with your perfect arms and sturdy legs?  Nothing hurts on you, does it?  Not so much as a twinge.  If it did, your parents would haul you to a specialist before you could blink.  Nothing would be too good for you.  Who the hell are you to tell me how I should live my life?"

     "I just think you rely on her too much is all."  Hermione was clearly taken aback.

     "Do you?  Funny, I don't see you offering to lighten her load.  If you really gave a damn, maybe you'd offer to comb my hair or help change the linens once in a while.  But you don't, and I know why.  It's because you don't want to get your hands dirty.  It's all well and good to point out an injustice, but when it comes to it, that's all you can do.  Talk.  Why should you do anything else?  You're friend of Harry blessed Potter, and he'll always be there to clean up the mess."

     "You don't know what you're talking about.  And you still haven't denied that you could do more if you wanted to," Hermione said calmly.

     "Because you're right.  If hard-pressed, I _could_ do more, but honestly, it would take all the energy I had, and if comes down to lightening Winky's load to make you feel good about yourself or staying here at Hogwarts, there is no choice.  I'll do whatever I have to do keep my place here."

     "Including standing on the back of an innocent house elf," Hermione said hotly.

     "I would stand on the backs of a thousand house elves if I had to," she said softly.  "Even break them.  I wouldn't like it, but I'd do it.  I know what I want, and I'll do what has to be done to get it.  Even if those things are unpleasant," she said quietly.

     Hermione regarded her coolly.  "You should be ashamed of yourself."

     "So should you.  At least I don't base my whole identity around my best friend and live in his shadow like an underfed dog begging for table scraps."

     Hermione's eyes darkened with fury, and in them Rebecca could see the desire to strike out.

     _Hit me.  I dare you.  I want you to._

     She did, too.  She wanted to feel the surge of adrenaline, the heady rush of it.  She wanted a chance to hurt one of the Untouchables, to draw blood from the Holy of Holies, to show that they were no more than human.  Most of all, she wanted a chance to slap the taste out of Hermione Granger's mouth.  Her hand was heavy with the need for it, and her ears could already hear the satisfying crack of flesh striking flesh.

     A hand fell on her shoulder, and she very nearly shoved it off, but her nose was mercifully faster than her reflexes.  It caught the smell of allspice and parchment dust before her hand could commit the fatal error.  Starched cotton brushed her upper arm.  Puritanical black.

     "Miss Stanhope, come with me."  Satin belladonna.

     "Yes, sir."  She did not look around.  There was no need.  She carefully backed away from Hermione and turned toward the door.  

     Another chair scraped from the High Table.

     _Shit.  Here comes McGonagall to stick her nose in.  Probably wants to know what madness seized my brain and made me challenge the Holy Trio.  Need medication, I will._

Professor Snape's measured footsteps stopped abruptly.  "Wait here," he snapped.

     She stopped on a dime.  His footsteps retreated to the High Table once more, and then came the sound of three voices in whispered conference.  She knew them well.  One low and measured, smooth as honeyed cream.  Another shrill and strident even as it whispered.  The last calm, assured, carrying with it a quiet melody of serenity.  The sound of them made her nervous.  It meant Professor Snape wanted her alone.  Clearly, quelling an intra-House squabble had not been on his mind when he pulled her away from the table.  She bet a thousand Galleons that she knew what had been.

     _He wants to know what happened in there._

The voices continued, rising and falling in the rhythm of urgent speech.  There was the sound of fierce protest-McGonagall, no doubt-and then the low, serpentine murmur of Professor Snape.  A stifled protest.  Silence.  Then, two words.  "All right, Severus."

     His footsteps again.  "Follow me."  He swept past her, his robes billowing imperiously.

     "Yes, sir."

     She started forward, looking neither to the left nor to the right.  She riveted her eyes on the slinking swish of his cloak.  It was safest.  She wasn't a bit sorry for sharpening her tongue on the hind end of Hermione Granger, but it wouldn't sit well with the rest of Gryffindor, particularly the implied aspersion against Harry Potter.  Fred and George would not understand, and the confusion and disappointment in their eyes would sting, salt rubbed into a fresh wound.  

     _Since when have you lost your balls?  I taught you better than that.  Don't you ever be ashamed of sayin' what you think, no matter who you piss off.  Life isn't a popularity contest.  Not for you._

_     Fine._

She squared her slumped shoulders and turned to look at Gryffindor table, her head wobbling slightly.  Most of them had returned to their meals and chatter, but their eyes tracked her path as she moved.  Fred and George were too far behind her to be able to see their faces, but she could imagine them.

     _I wouldn't be looking for a warm reception in the Common Room tonight._

    _Not that it matters.  Everyone will be asleep by the time I get back._

     She followed him through the massive doors of the Great Hall and into the lonely corridors.  Though she was sorry to be leaving the feast and the raw magic permeating the air, she was no longer afraid to follow him.  She was comforted by it.  It was like their own private ritual, something no one else could share.  A strange smile passed over her face.

     _I know something you don't know.  I get to dance with the tiger._

     The confident clip of his sleek black boots tapped out a secret code over the cool stone floor.  It was the call to begin the dance again, the unceasing minuet of two minds groping for a foothold in the dark.  They were going to something illicit, something darker than sin and deeper than sex.  They were going to play the game again, and she couldn't wait.

     He moved along at his customary brisk stalk.  Never once did he look back to see if she was keeping up.  He took it for a matter of course that she was.  She felt a swell of pride at that.  It was a sign of quiet confidence, and she knew that to win his confidence, even in something so trivial as following in his wake, was an achievement unto itself.

     Down and down they went, until at last they reached the dungeons.  The cold settled over her bones like a mantle, and she drew in on herself to preserve body heat.  The air plumed from her nostrils like wisps of smoke from a sleeping dragon's snout when she exhaled.  Even the light from the torches was cold, smothered by the icy chill.  The sound of his footfalls was sharper here, and they rang in the stillness like a pickaxe striking frozen rock.

     She stopped when they reached the Potions classroom, fully expecting him to open the door and go inside, but he passed it by without a glance.  Her heart began to beat a little faster.  This was going to be different.  The stakes for this game were going to be higher.  The sweat of anticipation dewed on her palms, and her senses grew crisp.  Boots on stone became thunder in her ears.  Dust and allspice tickled her nose and made her want to inhale as much as she could.  The cotton threads of his cloak stood out in individual relief, and she was certain she could count them if she wished.  Beneath the thunder of his feet was the rattling whisper of her own indrawn breath.

     A jingle rattle cut across the solitude, wind chimes shuddering in the breeze.  Professor Snape held a ring of keys in one ghost hand.  He slipped one of them into the lock, and it turned with a grating hiss.  The door opened noiselessly, and he disappeared inside, vanishing into the narrow beam of torchlight that came from within like a phantom. 

     She rolled to the threshold of the door and froze.  She wasn't sure if she should go in or not.  This was not a classroom.  It was private living quarters, and she was staring at an enormous four-poster bed of rich, red mahogany.  There was no canopy, only dark ceiling and shadows.  The linens were plain white cotton.  A single, thin pillow lay at the head of the bed.  Opposite the bed was a wardrobe of matching wood, and over by the window sat a simple, sturdy desk.  Concealed in the shadows was a heavy chair with a pair of black trousers folded carefully over the back.

     _Professor Snape's pants, _she thought stupidly.  _His pants.  I'm looking at his pants._

     She had known, of course, that he wore pants.  She had seen him wearing them every day.  But seeing a pair of them draped carefully over the back of a chair was still stupefying.  It told her that there was more to him than just professorial robes and brutal discipline.  It meant he actually had to put them on in the mornings, that they were not sewn onto his skin.  It meant that, terror that he was, he was human.  There was flesh and bone inside his clothes, and anything that was flesh and bone could be bruised and broken.

     _I'm looking at Professor Snape's pants._

_     So you are.  If he wears them, that also means he has to take them off.  He has to get naked._

_     Shut up, Grandpa, just shut up._

     A vision passed through her mind of Professor Snape emerging from the tub, dripping wet, water beading on the ends of his fragile eyelashes and rilling down the valley of his chest.

     _St. Mungo's, here I come._

     Professor Snape sat behind the desk, and he was scowling impatiently.  "Well, come in," he snarled disagreeably.  "There are no monsters here.  And close the door."

     "Yes, sir."

     She rolled inside, pivoted, and gently closed the door, wincing at the cold silver beneath her hand.  This was surreal.  She was in Professor Snape's private chambers.  He had brought her to his inner sanctum.  She was frightened by the idea.  Why hadn't he just taken her to the Potions classroom?  No one would have dared intrude.  The other students knew by now that detentions with Professor Snape were her province alone.

     _Because there will be no interference here.  Not even the teachers come here._

Her stomach knotted uneasily.  She was very close to the tiger now, close enough to smell its meaty breath and feel the warmth of it on her face.  She wasn't just in the same cage with it anymore; she was nose to nose with it, and if she made a misstep, there would be no one to pull her back.  Her sense of complacency vanished and the fear of self-preservation filled the hollows of her bones with lead.

     She made her way to where he sat, maneuvering carefully and averting her eyes from the floor, terrified lest she should be treated to the sight of his unwashed underwear peeking from beneath the bed.  That much humanity was more than she could stand.  She came to a halt in front of his desk and gripped the armrests with vinyl-tearing force.  

     Neither of them said anything for a few minutes.  The silence was complete, save for the whisper of sand trickling through the hourglass.

     "That was quite a discussion with Miss Granger," he muttered.

     "I'm afraid we don't see eye to eye on things, sir."

     "Obviously," he said drily.  "What were you discussing?"

     "She seems to think I mistreat Winky."

     He rolled his eyes and snorted.  "Ah, yes, Miss Granger's campaign to save the world.  You'll find a S.P.E.W. badge on your pillow tonight, Miss Stanhope."

     "Sir?"  _What in the hell is S.P.E.W.?_

     He made no answer.  He simply sat with his long, white hands tented on the desk.  Several more silent minutes spun slowly by.  He seemed to be deciding how to approach the issue.  He didn't give a damn about her spat with Hermione Granger.  He wanted to know just what in God's name had happened between them in the Potions classroom.  That made two of them.  The specter of it sat between them, the white elephant in the sitting room, as it were.  She could feel him prowling around it, trying to make sense of the strange madness that had passed between them.

     "This afternoon in Potions, Miss Stanhope," he said slowly, "there was an incident."

     "Yes, sir," she agreed.

     He sat forward, his black eyes gleaming.  "What happened?"

     "I'm not sure, sir.  It's hard to remember."

     "Tell me what you do recall.  Leave nothing out," he demanded.  His eyes were blazing.

     _Christ, his eyes are beautiful, like polished onyx.  _She shook herself.  "I remember knocking.  Always knocking.  Wood beneath my knuckles.  Cold iron.  Gargoyle faces.  Disjointed phrases."  She shook her head, as if jostling it would bring forth more memories.

     "Phrases?  What phrases?" he asked sharply.

     "They don't make much sense.  Something about not having much time, about wanting to come in.  I kept saying something was coming, and I think it knew what it was once, but I don't now."  She squinted, trying to clutch a fading memory.  "Someone asked if I was there to save them."

     "Do you remember anything else?"

     She started to shake her head, and then something came to her.  "A sound.  A scary, _wrong_ sound.  A clittering.  I didn't like it.  And then there was the lullaby.  Or whatever it was."

     "Lullaby?"

     "Yes."  She straightened and recited it. "Let me in, child.  I will not harm thee.  I only carry death in my arms."  She stopped, feeling sick.  Even here in these austere surroundings, the thought disturbed her.

     He stiffened, his knuckles going white.  "You heard that?"

     Comprehension dawned.  It was you, wasn't it?"

     "Such a sharp wit," he murmured disagreeably.

     _Touche.  _She should have known it was him.  She had shared the damn thing with him, after all.  Who else would it have been?  Where had she been, then?  Someplace he knew?  It certainly hadn't been familiar to her.  At least now she knew why she hadn't been afraid of the voice.

     "Where were we, sir?"

     His jaw tightened.  "I don't know."

     _Yes, you do.  _"Oh.  Do you know anything about the lullaby, sir?"

     He only looked at her.  It was as though time had stopped, as though God had reached down and turned him to marble.  His blinking eyes and the slight rise and fall of his chest were the only indications that he was a living man.  She felt his eyes taking inventory of her soul, riffling through its contents with fingers deft and sure.  She put up no resistance, let him look as much as liked.  There was nothing for him to find.  She was hiding nothing.

     She had not rebuilt her defenses since he had so unwittingly smashed them down.  The rubble of them still lay strewn about in the pockets and recesses of her mind.  The dust had long ago settled, and all that was left was a vast, open plain with ten thousand identical holes burrowing to the center of her.  Each one held a different memory, a different secret, and some of them still lay behind immeasurable walls of crumbled rock.  The darkest of them still slumbered in the unbreakable steel vault in the furthest, most inhospitable corner.  It was safe to let him in.

     She shivered.  It was cold in here.  The flesh of her arms prickled with gooseflesh, and she pulled them between her knees to warm them.  No use in complaining.  He'd only remind her that they were in his territory now, and that if she were unhappy with his quarters, he would gladly deduct points until her blood attained the proper temperature.  So she pressed her lips together and prayed her teeth wouldn't chatter too loudly.

     He stood abruptly.  "Wait here," he ordered.

     "Yes, sir."  She watched him as he disappeared into another room.

     Out of Rebecca's line of sight, Snape moved about his small kitchen with purpose.  Out came the teakettle and lemongrass tea.  He rummaged in the topmost cupboard until he found what he was looking for, a vial of amber liquid.  He set it on the counter with a disagreeable thump.

     Damn that girl.  He couldn't get anything out of her, much as he had tried.  She was just as lost as he.  The things she had revealed to him had been everything he had seen from his end of the nightmare.  The same disjointed phrases, the same terrifying clittering.  Except for the gargoyle.  That had been new.

     _Of course it was.  You've never seen the outside of your fortress.  You're too busy hiding in it._

He turned on the stove with an irritable snap and set the kettle down with a thump.  So now she knew something about his fortress that he didn't.  How comforting.  Next she'd bring out the grappling hook and try to scale the walls.

     _Why didn't she just come in when you opened the door?_

     He froze, his lips parted in surprise.  _Had _he opened the door?  It was unthinkable that he would have.  He didn't remember it, but then, he could recall almost nothing.  What he could recollect was feverish and dreamy, a blurred mirror image.  One moment he had been staring into her deep blue eyes, and the next they had swallowed him up, becoming as wide and endless as the placid sea.  Head over heels he had tumbled down, drifting through a haze of blue so thick he was sure he could have put his hand through it and drawn it back to find that it was covered in gelid, glistening, blue ink.  Then he had landed with a bone-rattling thud and looked up to find himself inside his fortress.

     The rest was a jumble of tangled sounds and thoughts, misty perceptions without an anchor in fact or reality.  His head pulsed with a memory of gargantuan agony, of a pain so huge it blotted out all else.  He gripped the counter and gritted his teeth until it passed.  Sound and wind and sunfire hair.  And the lullaby, of course.

     That wasn't what it was, not precisely, but it was close.  He didn't know when he had first heard it, but it had been long ago, far before she was born.  It had been with him as a first-year at Hogwarts, but before that he wasn't sure.  He thought so.  A fuzzy memory of his mother singing it to him as he sat in her lap came to him, but it didn't quite ring true.  Wherever and whenever he had learned it, it had been with him ever since, and it had sounded in his head whenever danger drew near.  For a time, he had recited it to his victims before he brought the Killing Curse down.  It was his secret poem, the secret song of his heart.  No one else had known it.  Yet she had recited it back, word for word, in the proper cadence.

     He opened his cupboard, pulled out a teacup, inspected it, then put it back.  Too fine a china for her.  She was a trembling wreck of a girl under the best of circumstances.  He pulled out another one.  Still too fine.  He reached back into the furthest corner and groped around until his fingers landed on something heavy and coarse.  Curious, he pulled it out.

     He looked at it in consternation for a moment, and then he remembered.  Minerva had given him a tea set for the staff Boxing Day party seven years ago.  An attempt to refine him, he supposed; never mind that he already owned three set of exquisite tea rose china.  The set had been hideous, clunky, as graceful as a chipped boulder, and he had hidden it away in the hopes that it would disappear.  Over the years it had.  He thought he had gotten rid of it all, but apparently here was a survivor.  It was perfect for Stanhope.  Hell, if she broke it, he might award her a point or two for ridding him of such an eyesore.

     _When Albus turns a backflip, I will._

     The teakettle gave a shrewish howl, and he jerked it from the heat.  He turned the heat off, spooned two teaspoons of tea into the cup, and poured boiling water over it.  He stirred it a bit, reached for the milk, and hesitated.  He didn't think Americans took milk in their tea.  Then again, they usually took their tea cold.

     _Sod it.  If she doesn't like it, she can bloody shampoo with it.  I could give her nothing at all._  He poured in a generous drizzle of milk.

     He retrieved the vial of amber liquid from its place on the counter, popped the cork, and tapped in two drops of the thin, amber liquid.  It floated on the surface of the steaming tea for a second before sinking to the bottom  Another quick stir.  That should do it.  He picked it up and left the kitchen.

     He set the tea on the outer edge of the desk and took his seat again.  "That is for you, though I would advise you wait a while if you value your tongue," he said gravely.

     She looked at the steaming cup, blinked, and then looked at him.  "Thank you, sir," she said uncertainly.

     "I have no intention of poisoning you," he said waspishly, irritated by her trepidation.  "It will help ease your symptoms."

     "Sym-how did you know?"  She was eyeing him incredulously, an embarrassed blush spreading behind her ears.

     "I have a sensitive nose," he said bluntly.

     She transformed from young girl into a beet in the blink of an eye.  Until that instant, the reddest thing he had ever seen had been the famous Weasley locks.  She suddenly looked very small perched in her chair, and in her eyes was a silent prayer for the floor to swallow her up.

     "Oh, stop it," he snapped.  "There are four hundred girls in this school, and not a day goes by that my nose isn't offended by some stench or other.  You're hardly unique."  When she looked no better, he said, "Besides, you looked awful."

     "Thank you, sir," she said quietly.

     He glared at her, searching for signs of malicious cheek.  After a long silence, "Your tea should be safe to drink."

     He watched two tremulous hands slowly reach for the steaming cup, the fingers of her frail hands splayed impossibly wide.  Merlin if his carpet wasn't about to acquire a new stain.  His hand shot out to grab the cup.  "Allow me.  This carpet cost a fortune," he muttered gruffly.  He lifted the cup from the saucer and held it to her lips.

     She was staring at him.  _Where is Snape, and what have you done with him? _her eyes asked.

     _I don't know.  _"Hurry up.  I haven't got all night."  He shifted from foot to foot.

     "Yes, sir."  She took one sip, then another.  "This is very good, sir."

     "I'm thrilled with your assessment.  I can rest easy knowing I have a career as a manservant after my Potions-making days come to an end.  Can you hold this on your own now?"

     She took it from him, and he winced as it jittered dangerously.  "Spill one drop, and I'll deduct a thousand points," he hissed.

     "Yes, sir," she said, and he could tell that she wouldn't have cared had he threatened ten thousand.  At the mention of point loss, a sneer had twisted her features for an instant.

     Intrigued, he said, "Points no longer concern you?"

     "No, sir."  Another sip.

     "Professor McGonagall would be appalled."

     A snort, and the cup trembled again.  "I suppose so, sir."

     "Have a care with that cup.  Scald yourself, and I'll never hear the end of it."

     The cup stilled.  "Yes, sir."

     "Am I correct in assuming you are not terribly fond of our esteemed Deputy Headmistress?"

     A very long pause.  She took a sip of tea and swirled it around in her mouth, biding her time.  Her eyes darkened as she considered her answer.  Finally, "It isn't wise to speak ill of one's superiors, sir."

     "That may be, Miss Stanhope, but it is also unwise to refuse to answer a direct question from a Professor," he said quietly.  "Besides, the stupidity of slandering those in positions of authority has never stopped anyone else."

     She looked up at him, and when their eyes met, he knew she'd caught his meaning perfectly.  She gave a halting, one-shouldered shrug.  "Fair enough, sir.  No, I am not."

     He tutted.  "How very un-Gryffindor of you," he said snidely.  "May I ask why?"

     She pursed her lips and dropped her gaze into her teacup.  She studied it for a very long time, as though she were trying to divine the answer from the soggy dregs there.  Her finger absently stroked the side of the cup.  _Tap tap_ went her finger in slow and contemplative rythmn.  "She's a liar, sir."

     Of all the things he had expected to hear, that was not one of them.  His eyes narrowed imperceptibly.  He had known Minerva for more years than he wished to consider, and though he found her to be many things-annoying, self-righteous, and an alarming prig, he had never known her to lie.  Such an unfounded accusation must be dealt with.

     "That is a very serious accusation to level at a teacher, Miss Stanhope, and unless you have solid evidence with which to back your claim, I suggest you rethink your assessment," he said coolly.

     She set her teacup down, and when she looked at him, he noted with some surprise that there was no chagrin in her eyes, only steely conviction.  "She lies to herself," she said softly, folding her hands in her lap.  "She thinks she understands me, what I need, what I think, what I feel, but she doesn't.  She tries to pretend that I don't bother her, but I know I do.  She keeps staring at me, all the time.  Even in the train station, she was staring.  She thought I didn't see, that I've never seen, but I've always seen.  _Every _time."  Her small hands were fisted and shaking in her lap.

     _I've no doubt about that.  You see everything, whether you want to or not.  Do you ever pray for blindness?_

     "She's not what she seems.  Everyone thinks she's so good and virtuous, but she's as dirty as the rest of us.  So is all of Gryffindor, for that matter.  They're just better-looking hypocrites, is all."  Her eyes were blazing with smoldering fury now.  "You hate me, sir, but at least you have the guts to do it to my face.  You don't hide behind such nauseating goodness, not like her, and not like Potter."  She spat the last word as though it were dreadful poison.

     _You hate me, sir._  That had been true once.  He had hated her with all the hatred that was in him.  He had longed to break her will beneath his iron heel, and the urge to throttle her had haunted his dreams the way naked and wanton witches cavorted through the nightscapes of the young men in his charge.  But now that loathing had faded, its place usurped by curiosity stronger than addiction.  He still didn't _like_ her, and he would shed no tears should she return to the United States, but he no longer wished to drive her out.  For as long as she remained here, he wanted to plumb the depths of her mind, to find out what made it work, what made her keep going in spite of a thousand obstacles that said she shouldn't.

     _Curiosity killed the cat._

_     Balderdash.  Stupidity did him in, and I have no intention of being a fool._

_     No one ever does._

     "She wanted…but I wouldn't.  I wouldn't."

     That caught his attention.  "She wanted what, Miss Stanhope?"  He leaned forward in his chair.

     But whatever courage had caused her to speak so freely, so unconsciously, had deserted her, and she dropped her gaze to the toes of her scuffed white speakers.  He heard a knuckle pop as she forced her fingers to relax.  

     "I don't know, sir," she muttered. 

     "She wanted what?" he repeated.  "You've come this far.  No use backing out now."

     "Nothing, sir."

     He waited.  She would tell him eventually.  The silence spun out, passing over both of them like the hand of an unseen lover.  One minute.  He saw her look around the room as though seeking help from the draperies in the window.  Two minutes.  She ran her finger over the fine down of hair on her forearm.  Three minutes.  She licked her lips and opened her mouth to speak.

     A sharp rap sounded on his door.  He stifled a groan.  He knew that knock anywhere.  _Damn her.  Almost.  I almost had her.  _"Come."

     The door opened, and Professor McGonagall stuck her head in.  "Professor Snape, I just came to see how things were getting on."  Her eyes widened when she saw the half-empty teacup.

     "Yes, Professor McGonagall, you caught me.  A few minutes more and I would have successfully poisoned her."

     "That isn't funny."  She walked in and inspected the bottom of the cup, searching, he supposed, for some trace of lethal poison.  "Isn't this one of the set I gave you for Boxing Day?"  She sounded pleased.

     "Yes.  I gave it to Stanhope in the vain hope that she would rid me of it," he snapped.

     "I see."  Disappointment flashed across her face.  "You've been here nearly an hour."

     He was too angry at her ill-timed interruption to feel like a prat.  "Thank heavens!  I still haven't mastered the art of hourglass reading.  What would I do without you?"

     "I came to collect her.  It's time she returned to her Housemates," she said stiffly.

     His eyes flicked to Stanhope, who sat staring at McGonagall's back.  That flat, reptilian gaze was back, the one that screamed of hatred seared into flesh and bone.  She felt his gaze and turned her eyes to him, and he saw her wage a silent war with herself.  He saw the question in her eyes, the plea for rescue, and then he saw it die.  She had decided it was useless.  Her gaze returned to McGonagall, and he saw the walls go up, saw the stones sliding into place.  Her fortress was alive and well as far as the rest of the world was concerned.

     "Actually, Professor McGonagall, her detention starts in a mere twenty minutes.  It would be useless for her to return to Gryffindor Tower."

     Disbelief flickered in Stanhope eyes, and an ugly smile flashed at McGonagall's back.  Seeing it gave him a queer stab of satisfaction.

     "Is that so?  Well then, I'll leave you to it.  Remember, half-past twelve."  She started for the door.

     "How could I forget?"

     She shot him an irritated glare and opened the door.  Before she left, she looked at Rebecca for a very long time, and in her eyes was an unfamiliar expression.  

     _Defeat.  It's defeat,_ he thought, and then the door closed, leaving him alone with the mercurial, misshapen child that drew him against his will.  _Push her away.  She's dangerous._

_     Too late, too late_, the warning voice in his head whispered again, and this time he knew it was right. 


	18. Stairs Steep, Proceed With Caution

Chapter Eighteen

     The first Saturday of Quidditch season dawned bright and crisp.  A light breeze blew from the east, making the grass sway and ripple gently, passing whispered secrets from blade to blade in merry communion.  Warm, honeyed sunlight blanketed the castle and grounds, and, pillowed in the lazily drifting clouds, the insect buzz of excited, faraway voices carried across the sky, a happy din originating from the Quidditch pitch.

     Rebecca Stanhope did not revel in these things.  Indeed, she was not aware of them at all.  She was in the silent, heavy air of the Hogwarts library, surrounded by weak, rheumy sunlight and swirling dust motes, silent sentinels to her lonely chore.  The labored scratch of a quill and the rustle of turning pages drifted through the cavernous space.  The library was empty save for herself and Madam Pince, who hovered militantly behind her desk, eyes large and questing behind thick, round spectacles.

     She thumbed through a volume on aquatic healing plants, bored.  She was working, as she had been for weeks now, on an essay about the healing properties of aquatic plants and the distillation of them for Potions work.  It was yet another in the unending stream of scrolls and parchments Professor Snape had demanded of her since the scalding.  The fourth, by last count.  The first three she had turned in had been deemed unsatisfactory on account of her "abominable penmanship."  About the actual content of the essays, he had uttered not a word.

     She dropped her quill and flexed her fingers, letting out a slow breath.  Her hand burned and prickled, the nerves and muscles twanging with exhaustion.  Not for the first time, she thought longingly of her Dicta-Quill.  Things would be so much simpler if he would let her use it.  She could have had the essay done in three days instead of a week and a half.  She frowned, fuming at his deliberate obstruction of her academic potential, and then she forced her lips to relax.  No use pouting about it.  He would see her point of view at about the same time he was named Teacher of the Year.  The Dicta-Quill in her room was never going to touch ink on a Potions parchment.  Still, she wished…

     _Wish in one hand and shit in the other.  See which gets filled first_, came her grandfather's voice.

     "Thanks, Grandpa, that's just the visual I need at this time of the morning," she muttered.  She sat back in her chair and scrubbed her hands over her face.

     "Did you say something, Miss Stanhope?"  Madam Pince's voice floated eerily in the still, dusty air.

     "Uh, no, ma'am."  She turned her head to see the librarian's pale frame silhouetted in the milky sunshine dribbling lazily across the Persian rugs that carpeted the cool stone floor.  Her shadow carried a book as broad as her chest.

     "Very well.  Just leave the books there when you're finished with them."  Footsteps as she retreated to the protective rampart of her desk.  A heavy thud as she set the book down.  A sneeze.  The crackling creak of old leather as the book's spine stretched.  Silence.

     _Oh, don't get all offended on me now.  You used to giggle like a loon whenever you heard it.  High humor, it was.  Too good for it now, are you?  Hmph.  Besides, if old Professor Glum there came to you and said you could use the Dicta-Quill with no strings attached, would you?_

_     Hell, yes.  I'm sick of being stuck inside the library every weekend.  Well…maybe not._

She scratched the side of her nose.  That _was_ a question, wasn't it?  Her finger slowed as she pondered it.  It was this morning's Million Dollar Question.  Would she use it if he told her she could?  On the one hand, it would simplify her life immensely.  Homework would take one-third the time it did now, and Winky, bless her little soul, would stop fretting over her stiff, sore fingers and making daily threats to drag her to Madam Pomfrey for some foul-smelling liniment and futile tutting.  It would also give her free time to work on her Exploding Snap finesse, which was negligible, and just rest.  Maybe she could actually talk to Neville, Seamus, and the twins instead of mumbling incoherently at them as she staggered into bed at one o'clock in the morning.  It would be nice.

     But on the other hand, it would also mean that she had lost, that she had thrown in the towel in the mental war of attrition between herself and Professor Snape.  It would mean that she had capitulated and was willing to admit that he was right, that she was incapable of existing in his world, playing on his field with the rules he had established.  It would mean surrendering all the precious ground she had gained in his eyes.  It would mean branding herself a proven disappointment.

     _To hell with that.  _ She pulled another book from the pile in front of her and flipped it open.

     She would battle the book mites and impending myopia from poring over hundreds of tomes filled with microscopic text until the last, until the chiggers had stripped every scrap of flesh from her arms and her desperate squinting had narrowed her eyes to irritated slits.  She would sacrifice every free moment of her time here to the cause of forcing him to see her, to register her on his internal radar as more than an unwanted charity case, to count her as an equal, if not to himself, then at least to the other students.

     Besides, the Gryffindor Common Room was not the most comfortable of places at the moment.  Ever since their verbal skirmish in the Great Hall, Hermione had been avoiding her with the utmost care.  They were like two cats quarreling over territory, claws extended and tails rigidly erect, fur on their backs standing on end.  They eyed each other warily when they passed on the stairs or chanced to be dressing at the same time.  Hermione's expression was always a mixture of defiance and contrition, much to her bemused annoyance.  If Granger was going to bellow her convictions, she might as well stick with them.  No use drifting around like a pole-axed weasel after the fact.

     _Water Plants of the Caribbean_ proclaimed the table of contents.  She stifled a yawn.  Good Christ.  She trailed her fingertip down the page, scanning the rest of the chapter titles.  _Plants of the South Pacific, Aquatic Herbs of Asia, Medicinal Properties of Watercress._  That last was mildly interesting.  She checked the page number.  _413._  She painstakingly shuffled the pages until she found it.

Medicinal Properties of Watercress 

     Watercress, a flowering, green-leaved plant of the mustard family, can be found in Europe in Russian Asia, usually alongside springs and running watercourses.  It can be recognized by its smooth, shiny, brownish-green leaves, which are of the pinnatifid variety.  It also possesses smaller, ovate leaflets.  When in bloom, small, white flowers are produced at its extremities, forming a terminal panicle.

     The constituents of watercress are numerous and include:  a sulfo-nitrogenous oil, iodine iron, phosphates, potash, with other mineral salts, bitter extract, and water.  Its volatile oil is rich in nitrogen and also contains sulfur when found in the sulfo-cyanide allyl.

     Watercress is particularly valuable as an antiscorbutic, and it has been used as such from the earliest times.  As a salad, it promotes appetite.  Juice from the bruised leaves will prevent blotches, spots, and blemishes when applied as a lotion.  It has also been used as a specific in tuberculosis, and is most potent when in bloom.

     It is often mistaken for Marshwort, or Fool's Cress, a lethal, highly toxic plant.

     Feh.  Useless.  Professor Snape would give less than a damn about a glorified zit cream.  Marshwort sounded interesting, though.  Anything about that in here?  She flipped to the index.  Marshwood, marshwort.  _512.  _She riffled the thin, yellowing pages.

Marshwort 

Marshwort, a close relative of watercress and member of the mustard family, is found in Europe and Russian Asia, generally alongside streams and other watercourses.  It is often mistaken for its benign relative, watercress, which can be used in salads.  It is distinguishable, however, by its hemlock-like white flowers, and when out of flower, by its finely-toothed leaves, which are longer and a much paler green than its harmless counterpart.  Its Latin name, _Nasturtium, _is derived from the words _nasus tortus_, or 'convulsed nose', on account of its pungent odor.

     It has no known medicinal purpose, and is fatal if ingested.

     Well, that was a whole lot of nothing.  She slammed the book shut and shoved it aside.  A throat cleared behind her.

     "Sorry, ma'am," she said, wiping dust from her eyelashes.

     "What is the library motto, Miss Stanhope?" came the shrill, warning retort.  Pince sounded very much like McGonagall.

     Rebecca sat up straight and recited the litany that had been drilled into her tortured brain the instant her tire tread had crossed the threshold into the dogged Madam Pince's territory.  "My hands will be spotless ere I touch a single volume among these stacks.  I shall not fold, crease, spindle, smudge, smear, doodle, stain, tear, or otherwise deface the books herein.  I will treat books with the respect and dignity they deserve.  Should I fail to live up to this oath, I hereby grant Madam Pince, the esteemed librarian, the right to fold, crease, spindle, smudge, smear, doodle, stain, tear, or otherwise deface _me_, and I will be banished from the Hogwarts library for all eternity."

     "Too right.  Have a care," she demanded primly.

     "Yes, ma'am."

     There had to be _something_ she could use in these ancient, moldy volumes.  She pulled a volume toward herself.  Some of the cover flaked onto her fingers, and she grimaced, eyes shifting furtively to see if Madam Pince had seen the grievous transgression.  When no outraged, murderous bellow sounded from behind her, she counted herself fortunate and gingerly opened the nondescript cover.  Her fingertips stung ever so slightly, as though the tannic acid used in curing the leather had begun to leach from its pores.  A yellow, stale puff of dust erupted from the crease, and she coughed, wiping her hand across her lips to rid them of the thin coat of tickling, chalky dust that had settled there.

Complete Muggle and Magical Toxicology By 

**Salvatorus Caligula, IV******

_Nice name,_ she thought wryly, delicately fingering the crumbling pages.  With a title like that, there had to be something worth discussing inside.  She flipped through the pages, letting her eyes stop where they would.

**     Atropine:  **A naturally occurring alkaloid of _Atropa belladonna,_ it is also a highly competitive antagonist of muscarinic cholinergic receptors.  It is absorbed from the gastro-intestinal tract and excreted in the urine.  Atropine undergoes hepatic metabolism and has a plasma life of 2-3 hours.  It should be stored away from light and should never be frozen.

     She yawned.  Deadly dull.  The text was far over her head; she understood exactly nothing, and such ignorance would unquestionably show in her work.  Best to look for something a bit more within her grasp.  She continued her search.  "Cyanide" was the next word to attract her attention.

     **Cyanide:  **Cyanide can exist in two forms-as a gas called hydrogen cyanide, as a powder called sodium or potassium cyanide.  Hydrogen cyanide, under the name of Zykklon B, was used as a Muggle genocidal agent in the Great War of 1939-45.  It is also used in the execution of dangerous criminals.

     Despite its obvious and dangerous toxicity, indeed, lethality, it is used in countless Muggle activities, including metallurgy, the manufacture of paper, textiles, and plastics.  It is also used in the development process of-

     Her reading was interrupted by the shuffle, scrape, and pound of excited footsteps.  Shadows jostled in the corridor, and then Seamus and Neville appeared, sweaty and grinning, hectic patches of heat on their cheeks.  It was obvious from the way they huffed and wheezed that they had run at top speed to the library.

     "Hey," she said, giving them a faint, puzzled smile, "I thought you guys were going to the Quidditch match."  Her fingers trembled beneath a half-turned page.

     "Oh, we are," said Seamus jauntily, "and so are you."

     "That's right," agreed Neville with a Cheshire cat grin.  "It'll be fun."

     "Oh, I can't.  I've got to finish this essay for Professor Snape."  She gestured at the half-filled parchment in front of her.  "It was sweet of you to offer, though."

     "Bollocks!  The essay can wait.  You need to have some fun," insisted Seamus, his brown eyes glowing.

     "Yeah.  All you do is hang around in this library all weekend," said Neville.  At the sight of Madam Pince's disapproving glower from behind her book, provoked no doubt by the perceived insult to her immaculate haven, he hastily amended, "I mean, not that the library is a bad place or anything, really, it's just, well, there are other things to do, is all."  He fell silent when he realized his feeble attempt at appeasement had fallen on deaf ears.  Pince continued to glare beadily at him, her scrutiny punctuated by the offended flip of pages.  After several long and uncomfortable seconds, she stood, her hatchet nose buried in the cradling sheath of fading text, and shambled behind an impressive row of long, stout bookshelves.

     "I'd love to, but you know how Professor Snape is.  If I don't finish it, he'll have me for breakfast."

     "On dry toast with a spot of tea, no doubt," agreed Seamus amiably.  "What difference does it make?  The old git has you in detention for the rest of your life.  Probably your firstborn's, too.  How much worse could it get?"

     She pursed her lips.  He had a point.  As it stood, she _would_ be in the depths of Professor Snape's dungeons until the end of days.  The Camoflous Draughts she had produced, while markedly improved were still not perfect, and they never would be.  The cuts required were simply too precise for her stiff, fumbling hands.  The good professor was well aware of this, or so she suspected, and he had no intention whatsoever of cutting her any slack.  Even if, by some unfathomable miracle of God, she managed to concoct a perfect Camoflous, she was quite certain that he would not relieve her of her burden.  Most likely he would tell her that she now had to create a perfect Anti-Quease, or a perfect Dreamless Sleep Draught, or a perfect anything, so long as she did not escape his domain, his unceasing vigilance.  He wanted her there, for reasons known only to him, and strangely enough, she wanted to be there.

     It was tempting, though, this proffered opportunity to slip the shackles from her feet and bound and leap and breathe fresh, green air for a few hours.  It had been weeks since she had experienced the joy of being one of the throng, a member of the thriving tribe called the Hogwarts student body.  She had been separated from the symbiote for too long, deprived of the revivifying rush of life coalescing and parting around her in the glorious, warm, collective heartbeat that pulsed in the vibrant hues of green, blue, yellow, and red.  She no longer felt its resonance within her, and she missed it.

     Still, shirking her homework was not possible.  It had long ceased to be homework.  It was a gauntlet thrown down in haughty challenge by an opponent sure of her failure.  If she tossed it aside for a moment of fleeting pleasure, she would suffer the indignity of seeing his smirking, superior face, of seeing the knowing gleam of victory in those black eyes.  She would falter.  The upraised baton of momentum would slip from her fingers and she would be left with nothing.  It wasn't worth it.

     "Sorry, guys, but I can't."  She reached for her quill.

     "Right.  That does it.  You're coming with us."  Seamus marched resolutely forward.

     "No way," she laughed.  "Absolutely not."

     Seamus paid her no attention.  He marched behind her chair and grasped the push handles.  He pulled with all his might, grunting when the chair moved not at all.  He tried again with the same result.  "How do you move this thing?" he demanded.

     "I'm not telling."  If they couldn't move her, they would give up and leave her alone.

     "That the way it is, then?  I'll get you moving.  See if I don't."

     "She moves with that stick," Neville offered, pointing at her joystick.

     She shot him a venomous glance.  _Thanks a lot_, she mouthed.  Neville blushed.

     Seamus leaned over her shoulder and peered down at the glossy black joystick.  He prodded it with an inquisitive fingers.  "This moves your whole machine?  Wicked."  He wrapped his fingers around it.

     "I wouldn't-,"

     Too late.  Seamus gave a vigorous yank, and the chair shot backwards, ramming into his belly and shins with staggering force.  The breath was driven from him with a loud "Ooof!"  

     "Let go," she said, struggling not to laugh.

     But he didn't let go.  Instead, he shoved the stick forward.  She lurched forward, smashing into the heavy wooden table and pinching the skin of her legs between the table lip and chair.  The wheels continued to whine and spin, the armrests groaning as the chair pushed against something it could not best.

     "Owwowww!  Good Christ, leggo!  LEGGO!!  Ow, shit!" she screeched, thrashing as the wood dug into her thin knees and upper thighs.  The pinched nerves were sizzling, and an enormous spasm was building beneath her flesh.  She could feel it there, setting its diseased claws into the taut fiber of her muscles, crouching on its cruel haunches.

     _Oh, Jesus.  Seamus, let go.  Let go.  Please let go right now.  _"SEAMUS!!  Let GO!" she shrieked.  If she had the spasm with her leg under the table, she would break every one of her toes and probably her ankle.

     Some of the desperate urgency in her voice must have reached him, penetrated the veil of his pain, because he released her joystick and stumbled away, trying to rub his bruised shins and get his breath back at the same time.  He looked absurdly like a one-legged crane.  She jerked back on the stick, tearing away from the table with a loud, ominous groan.  She leaned down, clutching her wounded knees.  She couldn't see them yet, but she knew that by sundown there would be a thin, bruised band across both legs, dark as a strip of fetid blight in an otherwise pristine banana.  It would hurt like a mother, too, deep and ugly, a low, ferocious throb that burrowed into her bones and made the muscles cramp with remembered pain.  Already the red welt was forming, the last flush of sunlight before night swallowed the sky.  The sting of it needled her pale, cool skin like the acid burn of heated copper, and she grunted.

     "You all right?" Seamus asked, hobbling beside her on his throbbing shins.

     "I think so," she said slowly, sitting up with a hiss.  "Don't think the table did so well, though."

     "Huh?"  Seamus turned his head toward the table and let out a slow whistle when he saw the damage.  "Oh."

     "I'll say," muttered Neville, coming over to investigate the carnage.  The three of them surveyed the aftermath of their misadventure in silence.

     The fine mahogany table, once proud and pristine, now bore a grievous wound.  The smooth, gleaming varnish had been scoured off by the friction of her adamant, lunging chair, and a deep black smudge of dye from her vinyl armrests scorched the exquisite grain.  The scrape was cruel, ragged in places, and obvious as the light of day.

     "Madam Pince is going to kill me," she moaned quietly.  "That table must cost a fortune."

     "Maybe she won't notice for a while, and by the time she does, maybe someone else will have sat here," offered Neville, but he said it without much hope.

     "The only person here with better eyesight than Madam Pince is Professor Moody," she said glumly.

     "Well, maybe if we leave now, she won't see it until we're long gone.  And if she didn't see it, _we_ didn't do it."   Seamus motioned her forward with his hand and began to creep toward the door.

     She still hesitated.  The essay for Professor Snape was only half-finished, and he could ask for it at any time.  That was another of his favorite tricks, to never give her a firm due date on her assignments, only a nebulous "week of the twenty-third," or "the third week of November."  She had learned quickly never to try and anticipate his demands.  If she expected him to call for it on the first day of the time period, he inevitably waited until the last, and she had rushed the project for nothing.  If she took her time, anticipating that he would collect it at the end of the time frame, he asked for it the first second on the first day.  So she gave up and learned to have them finished days in advance.  This one was cutting it close.  Only two days remained before the opening of the time window.

     "I don't know…"

     Before any further argument could be had, her body revolted.  The spasm that had been building for the past few minutes suddenly erupted.  Her foot shot out and kicked the battle-scarred table, sending numbing pulses of impact shiver up her leg.  The toxicology book she had been reading tumbled to the floor, landing with a heavy thump.  Her quill rolled to the edge and teetered precariously there, seesawing lazily.

     _Well, _that_ was a Bruce Lee moment._  The thought was so ridiculous and so random that she was seized by a mad urge to giggle.  She clapped her hands over her mouth and tittered.  Soon Seamus was chuffing and biting the inside of his cheek.

     All the noise drew Madam Pince from behind the bookshelves.  The back-breaking volume was still in her hands.  "Miss Stanhope, what is the meaning of all this noi-," she began, then faltered.  Her eyes fastened onto the unbecoming gouge in the heretofore unblemished table.  "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?" she thundered, the impossibly loud voice shaking her sparse frame.  The book she held slipped greasily from her grasp and crashed to the floor with a sound like doomsday thunder, and the purple, ozone crackle of lightning flashed in her eyes.

     That decided her.  Heart in her throat, she scrabbled for the speed control.  Torn between terror at the advancing Pince and a feverish hilarity at the strange turn her day had taken, she could not find the mark.  Her fingers slipped three times before settling around the small black knob.  She struggled to turn it to the right, cursing softly when she slipped.  Less than two feet separated her from a furious Pince.

     _Come on, come on_, she thought, prodding frantically at the dial.  It slipped to the right with a stealthy click.  _Thank God._

     She turned the stick hard left, chortling helplessly as the wheels spun crazily, bunching up the thick rug as she pivoted sharply to the left.  For an instant, there was no movement; the rug had caught beneath the tread, preventing contact with the floor.  She rocked back and forth, trying to jar the rug loose.  A sudden lurch, and then the chair rocketed forward, slaloming and careening wildly.  The chair was at full speed and full power, and her control was minimal at best.

     She was too exhilarated and too terrified to laugh.  All she could manage was a reedy gurgle.  She was high on defiance.  The watery light filtering through the dust and shadows was suddenly a thousand times brighter than the light of a supernova sun to her eyes, and the rush of the wind in her face as she raced to the beckoning doorway was as fresh and bracing as crisp arctic air.  Freedom and sunshine were thirteen paces away, and on this day at least, she meant to have it.

     She was nearly there when she remembered the essay.  It was still lying sedately on the table, and if she left it there, any chance she had of finishing her work on time would go down the drain.  And Professor Snape would strip the penalty from her flesh, piece by anguished piece, with a joyous countenance.  Well, as joyous a countenance as he could manage, anyhow.  She skidded to a halt, the rubber of her tread squealing petulantly against the bare stone, sending up a gossamer spray of dust.  _Click.  Grrrrrt._  She spun around hard.

     Madam Pince was almost on top of her.  Her eyes were blazing, polished redwood fire.  She intended to avenge the shameful desecration of her sacred realm, and Rebecca had no desire to see just what she might do.  She threw it in reverse, not daring to look away from the enraged face of the advancing Mistress of Hogwarts Library.  The threshold and safety of the stairs were close at hand.

     _Please, Jesus, don't let my aim be off.  If it is, I'm in for a very long fall._

     She streaked backwards through the door, casting a wistful, longing gaze at the forlorn piece of parchment sitting on the table.  She needed to get it out of there, for the protection of her mental well-being, but any attempt she made to rescue it would surely result in all her hard work being torn to pieces in a paroxysm of righteous librarian fury.  Not even the most sophisticated Reparo Charm would be able to set it to rights again.  Stopping was out of the question, if Pince's demeanor was any indication.  Clearly, discretion was the better part of valor.

     Her rear wheels left the earth, and for a heart-squeezing, eternal moment, she was suspended over nothing but the tenuous grace of God.  She realized with dim alarm that the stairs were not there.  They had shifted during her flight, and when gravity exerted its inexorable force over the fervor of desperate wish, she was going to plummet at least four stories.

     _Our Father, who art in Heaven…_

     Her bones tingled with dreamy terror.  She could feel every hair on her body, was keenly aware of their roots descending beneath her frozen skin.  Her stomach catapulted into her throat, heavy with adrenaline.  Her heart beat twice more, rapid as a sparrow's, and then God let her go.

     _Hallowed be Thy name._

     The fall was exquisitely slow.  Each millisecond was as an hour, and the blood was heavy in her veins.  From the corner of her eye, she saw her hair fan out in a golden halo.  She wondered how it would look soaked with the blood from her broken body.  She made a half-hearted attempt to reach her wand, but her arms were logy with the knowledge of impending death, and so she let her hand fall to her side.

     _Thy Kingdom come_.

     She looked up as she fell, and she saw the white, horrified faces of Neville, Seamus, and Madam Pince.  It seemed that as she drew closer to forever nothingness, her senses grew sharper, drawing energy from the tissues that would soon need no sustenance.  She could see the huge, disbelieving, white saucers of their eyes, and the individual pinprick pores of their skin.  Madam Pince's thin, pale, dry lips were rounded in an _O_ of horror, and her thin, knotted hands were clamped to her pasty cheeks.  She saw with detached amusement that Neville was clutching her Potions essay in one trembling hand.  Seamus was fumbling in the folds of his robes, trying, no doubt, to reach his wand in time.  Incredibly, she felt herself laughing.  It was funny, really, a cartoon made flesh.

     _Thanks, Neville, but I won't be needing that anymore.  Thy will be done._

     Seamus wasn't going to make it.  Terror had rendered him useless.  His lips were moving, and from far, far away, she could hear his beautiful Irish brogue, so like her grandfather's.  It was the sound of good memories, and of home, and she smiled sweetly.  He was praying.  _Praying._  It was good to know she mattered.

_     On Earth, as it is in Heaven._

     The chair was beginning to tilt, bowing to gravity's will.  The ground was rushing to meet her, to crush her to its unyielding bosom.  She felt the weight of it pressing greedily into the small of her back.  She wondered if she would be aware of their abrupt union, or if all sensibility would depart from her in that first sundering second when motion stopped.  She would know very soon now.

     Seamus and Neville were receding quickly now, and Pince stood between them like a sculpture of Edward Munch's _The Scream._  Well, she wouldn't get in trouble for wanton destruction of library property, though Filch would likely long to throttle her for the mess she'd leave on his floor.  The seconds of her life ticked away, and she thought, not of hearth and home and loved ones, but of the sour face of the Hogwarts caretaker as he scraped and mopped her brains from the floor.  Another myth dispelled.

     Suddenly, a voice cut through the comforting quilt of numbness in which she had swaddled herself, a voice as bright and unexpected as the glint of midday sun on a shard of broken mirror.  It was authority and confidence, salvation and damnation, all wrapped in razorblade silk.

     "_Wingardium leviosa!_"  

     There was the rushing hiss of air, and warmth washed over her in a sparkling wave.  All motion ceased, and her neck snapped backwards with a painful jolt.  A spasm tore through the left side of her face, and she grunted, saliva dribbling down her chin.  Then the downward motion resumed, much more slowly and gently this time, until her wheels touched down with a gentle thump.

     She didn't move.  She didn't dare to.  The blood was still thudding in her ears like the footsteps of God, and her limbs were frozen with the sudden realization that they were still functional.  She felt the drool dribbling down her chin and belatedly decided to swallow, but her throat was still on standby, so she coughed, spraying spittle.

     _I'm still alive.  I'm still alive, _she thought wondrously.  Then she remembered the voice responsible for it.  She forced her elbow to unhinge, wincing as it popped, and turned her chair around.

     Professor Snape stood a few feet away, staring at her with his dead black eyes.  His wand dangled lightly at his side, but she could still feel the residual magic radiating from it.  A shattered china teacup lay at his feet in a small puddle of tea, and drops of it clung to the toes of his boots.  She took him in from the bottom up, craning her rigid neck to look him in the eye.  He suddenly seemed enormous.

     "Miss Stanhope."  Nothing else.

     Until that moment, she had never understood how much meaning could be poured into two simple words.  She opened her mouth to say something and found that she couldn't.  Not even a squeak.  She tried once, twice, and then she gave up, closing her mouth with a snap.  The familiarity that had diminished him in her eyes was gone, and he was once again the terrifying demigod and wielder of the power to crush her into powder.

     Why she should think such a thing when he had just saved her life was beyond her, but so it was.  The awe in which she had held him on the very first day she set foot inside his classroom, an awe that had gone dormant in the countless hours and nights since, had returned, and she shook with it, her fingers and teeth chattering with the force of it.  Looking up at him now was like gazing into the face of God, and she fought the urge to cower beneath his inscrutable gaze.

     _Miss Stanhope._  No one else in the world could say her name quite that way.  It sent a shiver of apprehension down her spine.  She knew from the bland, calculating expression on his face that it was currently synonymous with "big trouble."  No one else but he could turn her name into such a damning indictment.  There was anger in those words, and repulsed amazement at her stupidity, and underneath it all was professorial authority, hard as dried bedrock.

     Still, she dared not open her mouth.  Because everything in his voice, all the venom injected into those words, was deserved.  She _had_ been incredibly stupid.  She had violated the first rule of the road, had, to put it in plain old American vernacular, forgotten to watch where the fuck she was going, and her carelessness had very nearly earned her a trip to the mortuary.  She had known better, had known better since she was seven, as a matter of fact, and there was no excuse for what she had done.  Not for any adult, and especially not for Professor Snape, who had lost acquaintance with feeble excuses years ago.

     What to say?  Her brain was the only part of her that didn't seem to be frozen, and it was racing, agog and jumbled with thousands of words, all of them equally useless.  _Sorry, sir.  Was running from Madam Pince after I vandalized a library table and demonstrated my martial arts expertise._  Normally, such a thought would have inspired an irrepressible urge to titter, but now it only made her feel dizzy and sick.  The adrenaline was still thick in her system.  The biting tang of it lingered in her mouth, and in her heightened state of awareness, she was certain that he could smell it rising from her pores like redolent steam.

     _Please, sir, say something.  Ask me._  He remained still and silent, waiting.  The question hung between them, throwing out another tiny tendril of connection to join the glistening strand that already joined them in mutual confusion.

     Flirting with madness, she tore her eyes from his face and let them rove to the broken teacup at his feet.  Its delicate shards stared accusingly up at her like fragments of bone.  She could just make out the faint timbre of a tiny rose on one of the pieces.  Even to her untrained eye, it was exquisite.  Clearly, a fine china.  Professor Snape's fine china.  Oh, that the world would end right now.  That china was going to cost her dear.

     "Royal Albert.  I've had it since I was a young man.  A rich china, indeed.  The same can be said for the tea.  Earl Grey, it was.  Do you know it?"

     "I've heard of it," she said faintly.  Her head felt like a lead weight.

     _Look up at him, dammit.  You're not some simpering maiden._

     She forced her gaze upward, dragging it by sheer force of will.  He was fixed on her, arms folded across his chest, fingers lightly brushing the crooks of his elbows.  His eyes were sharp, shining with intellect and savage wit, and his glossy black eyelashes twitched with anticipation.

     _Say something, but don't you dare apologize.  He'll kill you on the spot._

     "Thank you, sir."  It came out as a rusty croak.

     "I was hardly going to spoil my boots with _you,_" he snarled with deliberate viciousness.

     After his mysterious civility of a few nights previous, his rancor struck her like a roundhouse slap, and she let out a dismayed squeak.  The muscles in her neck jumped uneasily.  She ventured nothing else.

     _Surely you didn't think he'd changed his mind, did you?  He wanted information, and when you couldn't give it, he was through with you.  Now it's back to square one._

The disappointment was so stark that she sucked in her breath.  Embarrassment for having allowed herself to believe that anything had changed between them warmed the frigid soles of her feet and made her scalp tingle with the tickle of its uninvited fingers.  Gall joined the adrenaline in her throat, and the thick, dark taste of anger almost made her gag.

     _Don't you let him see.  Don't you flinch.  Don't you give him the satisfaction._

     The fortress that had sustained her for so long was gone, but the will and tools that had built it were not.  Those were unending for as long as she should live, and she reached for them now, wrapping the cold hands of her bitterness around them, greeting them like old friends.  Set the bricks, then paste the mortar.  She would build her fortress again, and this time, nothing would break it down, neither respect nor compassion would undermine her this time.

     The scrape of the trowel, the satisfying burn of mental exertion.  She concentrated on the toil, pulling away from her folly, drawing the veil across her eyes and bending her back to the labor of reconstruction.

     _Never make that mistake again._

     "Of course not, sir.  All the same, thank you."  Disinterested.  Colorless.

     She saw his left eyebrow arch daintily, and his eyes sharpened still further.  He was searching her out.  _Good.  Search all you like.  I won't show you._

     "Are you all right?" he asked brusquely.

     The trowel wavered in its work.  Could it be that she was more than a commodity, after all?  She looked at him speculatively.  He certainly wasn't gushing concern, but neither did he seem to rue his decision to let her live.  She quietly set the trowel down.  He was a bastard; she had known that from the beginning.  What was the use of bowing out now?

     "Yes, sir.  I think so."

     "What, precisely, were you doing?" he demanded.  It had finally dawned on him that she wasn't going to volunteer the information.

     "I was attempting to escape from Madam Pince, sir," she told him.

     "You were what, Miss Stanhope?"  

     She cleared her throat.  "There was a misunderstanding in the library, and I damaged a table.  I thought discretion was the better part of valor, sir."  

     "I see."  He clearly did not.  He was studying her as though she were a fascinating new specimen of mad.

     At that moment, two steps of panicked footsteps clattered down the stairs, and she heard wheezing, pained breathing.  Neville and Seamus had arrived on the scene at last.

     _Don't come any closer.  Stay where you are.  He won't like it if you interfere._

     But of course they didn't.  Seamus skidded to her side, panting like a wounded buffalo.  His eyes were wide and wild, and his dark hair was plastered to his head in a sweaty skullcap.  

     "Saints be praised," he cried, crushing her in a hug.  "I though' you were gone for sure."

     "Yeah," said Neville weakly from behind her.

     She couldn't see him, but she could guess what he looked like.  Pale as bleach and wide-eyed as a bludgeoned fawn.  He was probably leaning against the wall, weak-kneed and terrified.  Poor devil.

     "Fast as lightning, you were, Professor," babbled Seamus, and then he realized who he was addressing and lapsed into silence.

     "Where is Madam Pince?" Rebecca asked, her eyes fixed on Professor Snape, who was still trying to digest the fact that he had received sincere praise from a Gryffindor.

     Seamus released her from the hug and straightened, looking chagrined and exhilarated at the same time.  "Oh, she's still standing there with her hands glued to the side of her face.  Bit scary, really."

     "I believe a trip to the library is in order," murmured Professor Snape, recovering himself.  He stepped lightly over the teacup and drying tea stain.  "Seventy points for my teacup, Miss Stanhope.  Thirty for my lost tea.  And fifty for nearly giving me a heart attack."

     Neville and Seamus spluttered, but she was unmoved.  She merely inclined her head as if to say, _Yes, sir_, and followed him up the stairs.  There was a momentary cramp of terror in her chest as they began their ascent, but when she felt Neville and Seamus at her flank, she forced herself to relax.  They wouldn't let her fall, and neither would Professor Snape, though he might flay her alive should she try it again.

     One hundred and fifty points was quite lenient, considering that she had almost killed herself.  If he had arrived even two seconds later, it would have been too late.  Only sheer luck had brought him to that place at that particular moment, and it occurred to her that she ought to be thanking God he hadn't needed to use the restroom or left for the Quidditch pitch.

     _Like the smallest of sparrows in His hand.  Can I get a hallelujah?_

     Everyone was quiet during the trek to the library, each absorbed in their own thoughts.  She could feel the tension emanating from Seamus and Neville, musky and faintly nauseating.  From in front of her came the warm scents of allspice and parchment dust.  They seemed to puff from Professor Snape's clothes with every step he took, an olfactory accompaniment to the clear, sparse sound of his boots clacking on the stairs.  Enveloped in the invisible, writhing currents of smell that laced the air, she took a deep breath and willed her shattered, seized nerves to settle.  The tremors that had started when she realized that the tiger still had his claws had not abated; they were as strong as ever, and her heels rose and fell in an incessant tap.

     _Stay a ways back.  Kick him in the shins, and you'll be making a second trip down the stairs, faster than the first, I'll wager.  _Good, old-fashioned Irish common sense.

     She moved back, mindful of the advice.  She had already experienced his temper, and she knew that any sudden motion from behind would produce disastrous results, especially since she so foolishly raised his hackles with her idiotic decision to back down the stairs.  Startle Professor Snape, and she would spend the rest of her short life in the Hospital Wing.

     Madam Pince was indeed still bolted to the fourth floor landing.  She was exactly as Rebecca had seen her during the interminable plunge.  Her wrinkled, blue-veined hands were still fastened to the sides of her face, and her brown eyes were wide and glassy.  Her mouth hung in a boneless gape.  She moved not at all, save for the shallow rise and fall of her narrow chest.

     At the sound of Professor Snape's approach, she turned her head slowly; it wobbled dangerously, as though she were overcome by a wave of vertigo.  She blinked, slowly, dreamily, and then her eyes cleared a bit.

     "Professor…Snape?"  She nodded as though to confirm her assessment.

     He snorted.  "Now that we're all here, perhaps we can proceed to the library?" he muttered irritably.

     She blinked more rapidly this time, and Rebecca saw some of the cobwebs fall from her mind.  "Mm?  Oh.  Oh, yes.  Of course. Absolutely."  She ran a trembling hand through her long, loosely-plaited auburn hair that was gracefully graying at the temples and crown.  She gave an unsteady laugh.  "Bit of a fright, that," she said weakly, and tottered into the library.

     Professor Snape said nothing.  He merely scowled disagreeably at her back and swept into the library behind her.  Rebecca followed dutifully in his wake.  It seemed unwise to stray too far, lest he should need to rebuke her further.  If he had to find her to do it, woe be unto her.  Seamus and Neville hung back by the door, well aware that this was one battle they should steer clear of.  Neville still held her Potions essay in a sweaty hand.

     _Probably smearing the ink, _she thought, a tad ungratefully.

     _At least he thought to get it for you, _rebuked her grandfather.

     She supposed so.  Though fat lot of good it would have done her had she fallen to her death.  Nonetheless, she smiled at Neville, nodding at the parchment he held.  He returned her smile, but she thought he looked a trifle queasy.

     _That's no wonder.  Not a good day for him, all things considered.  Nearly gets the unpleasant privilege of seeing a friend splatter on the stone floor eighty feet below him, and now he gets to spend time in the company of the worst person in the world._

     The aforementioned worst person in the world was presently examining the uneven gouge her chair had inflicted on the library table.  His head was bent studiously over it, and a thin, pale finger prodded it gently.  His lip curled into a momentary snarl and relaxed again.  He took a deep breath, as though trying to inhale the scent of wounded mahogany, discern the faint odor of dormant sap deep within the wood.

     _He could do it, too, with that nose of his.  Certainly smelled the blood well enough._

Heat prickled behind her ears.  That was something she would rather not think about.  It had been humiliating to know that he could sense such a thing, such an _ugly_, secret thing, especially after her unwanted vision of him emerging, dripping, from a bathtub.  That memory would be going into the _Don't Wish to Relive_ file if she could manage it.

     His brow furrowed, and he trailed the finger over the black smudge almost lovingly.  He held his fingertip up to his nose and sniffed.  Then he looked up at her, his eyes glittering.

     "Miss Stanhope."

     "Yes, sir?"  _Here it comes._

     "Can you explain this?"

     "Yes, sir.  I was working on the essay you assigned, and there was a mishap with the chair."

     "What sort of 'mishap'?"  His eyes bored into her face.

     "It was my fault, sir," Seamus interjected, stepping forward with a plaintive expression.

     Professor Snape whirled to face him.  "Mr. Finnegan.  I don't recall addressing you," he snarled.  "But since you've begun, please continue." He made a gesture of invitation with one hand.

     Too late, Seamus realized the error of his ways.  His eyes darted this way and that, trying to find a dignified exit from this mess.  Then, resigning himself to scathing excoriation, he said, "I came to take her to the Quidditch pitch, but she wouldn't come.  She wanted to finish the Potions essay.  I wouldn't listen.  I figured out how she made it go and tried to bring her with me, but I pushed her forward instead of back.  Hurt the table and her knees."

     At that, Professor Snape dropped his gaze to her knees.  "Roll up your robes," he demanded.

     She started to protest that she was fine, but then thought better of it.  No use antagonizing him further.  She leaned forward and painstakingly rolled up the hem of her robes, revealing her emaciated, pasty legs.  She closed her eyes against a stab of withering need to be anywhere else.  Why did they have to see this?

     Eyes still closed, her breath stopped in surprise when she felt a finger brush across the fiery bloodband on her knees.  It was as light as shifting dust, and cool, like the first touch of fresh air after a long confinement.  Gentle, delicate, careful.  All sensations to which she was unaccustomed.  It was oddly comforting, this touch, and she relaxed into it, wincing only when it reached a particularly painful spot.

     She opened her eyes to see Professor Snape unfurling her hem.  He looked up at her, letting it droop to her ankles.

     "That needs seeing to."

     "Yes, sir."

     "Whether you seek help is up to you," he murmured, and rounded on Seamus again.  "Once again, your startling ineptitude moves to the fore," he sneered.  "Thirty points from Gryffindor for endangering your fellow student.  I suppose we should thank the Fates that it wasn't Longbottom doing the driving.  Miss Stanhope would have had her limbs severed completely."  He spared the quaking Neville a scornful glance.  "Leave.  Now.  Miss Stanhope will be along in a moment."

     Seamus wasted no time in making a hasty retreat, but Neville bravely stepped forward, holding out the Potions essay.

     "Here, Rebecca," he mumbled, stealing a cautious peek at the watching Potions Master, clearly expecting him to lunge at any moment.

     Professor Snape _did _lunge, but not at Neville.  Instead he plucked the proffered parchment from his hand.

     "Thank you, Mr. Longbottom.  Out."  He never took his eyes off Rebecca.

     Neville went without a word, and they were alone again, just as they always were when they danced, when they played the game.  Madam Pince had sought refuge in the labyrinthine stacks and swaying towers of books.  Rebecca thought she could hear the desperate, searching scrape of her shoes as she looked for panacea in the written word.

     Professor Snape simply looked at her for a very long time.  His eyes betrayed no emotion, only a veiled thoughtfulness that made her heart gallop in her chest.  She tightened her grip on the armrests of her chair and fought the need to smile.

     _Oh, but the tiger is close now._  

     He looked at the parchment in his hand, his eyebrow raised ever so slightly in his austere face.  His eyes scanned it quickly, and a forelock of hair grazed his cheek.  Without thinking, he brushed it away.  When he reached bottom, he tapped his finger against it, as if pondering what he had read.  Then, silently and without preamble, he calmly tore it to pieces.

     "Your penmanship has not improved," he said shortly.

     She stared at him, fighting down her disbelief.  Ten days of her life had gone into that, and he had torn it apart like nothing.  He had not taken into account the hard work and careful consideration that had been poured into it.  He saw only its shoddy housing and cared nothing for the heartfelt craftsmanship inside.  He didn't even bother to try.

     _Your hygiene isn't much to sing about, either, _she thought childishly.

     _Don't you dare.  If you're going to play this game, play it clean.  He doesn't care about the work.  All he cares about is the end result, and your results just aren't up to snuff._

     She squared her shoulders and forced her jaw to relax.  "Yes, sir."

     He sneered at her, and she was struck by the idea that he knew what she was thinking.  She remained quiet as he began to pace around her, his strides long and fluid, his cloak swishing elegantly.  She heard his finger drum contemplatively on one of her push handles.  Step.  Step.  He stopped beside her left shoulder.

     "This…_contraption_ of yours is dangerous," he mused.

     "Yes, sir, I suppose it can be, but I can't live without it.  It's like my body."

     Step.  Step.  Turn.  Step.  In front of her again.  "If it were truly like your body, then one would think you would have a bit more care with it, don't you think?" he purred.

     _Touche._  She had walked right into that one.  "Yes, sir."  

     "Seventy-five points for your stupidity, and an additional seventy-five for the table."

     An involuntary cry escaped her.  

     "Whinge, and I'll make it one hundred each," he said coolly.

     "Yes, sir."

     "Now, since you seem incapable of wandering about on your own, I will be escorting you to the pitch.  That _is _where you were going, isn't it?"

     "Yes, sir."

     "I'll not babysit you again, Miss Stanhope.  Fall again, and Sprout will be able to use you as potting mulch."

     "Yes, sir."

     When he gestured her forward, she wordlessly obeyed.  Game, Professor Snape.  At the bottom of the stairs, they collected Neville and Seamus, and the strange entourage made its way to the Quidditch pitch.    

A/N:  The information on marshwort and watercress was obtained from the very helpful botanicals.com site, which has an index of various herbs and poison.  Many thanks.

     All information regarding atropine was found on nda.ox.ac.uk/wfsa/htm/u06/u06_17., in an article by LM Pinto Pereiro, M.D., University of the West Indies.

     All information regarding cyanide was gathered from bt.cdc.gov.

     Dedicated to my friend, Phyllis, who knew the risks of love and did it anyway.


	19. Feet and Inches on the Quidditch Pitch

Dedicated to Michael Dale Duncan Jr., who, on May 28, went to a far better place.  May you find rest in the arms of the Lord.  And to Priscilla, who is the embodiment of grace and dignity. 

Chapter Nineteen

     The Quidditch match was in full swing when they arrived.  Gryffindor was outscoring Hufflepuff handily, fifty to zero, and above their heads small figures zoomed, flashes of yellow and scarlet against the faded blue sky.  The sharp ripple and pop of windblown robes reached Rebecca's ears, and she smiled, squinting into the bright sunlight.  It was a vibrant, life-affirming sound, full of youthful exuberance, and hearing it made her inexplicably glad.  Her sudden plunge down the stairs faded into irrelevance.

     Professor Snape stopped at the entrance.  "Mind the stairs," he muttered, and left them without a backward glance to take his seat in the Slytherin box.

     "Sodding prat," hissed Seamus when Professor Snape was out of earshot.

     "Isn't he?" she said thoughtfully, her eyes following his progress to his seat.  His cloak fluttered regally as he climbed the stairs.

     Her hand twitched restlessly on her joystick.  She had very nearly followed him to the Slytherin section.  It had seemed such a natural thing to do.  Just push the stick forward and trundle along in his shadow, smothered by the earthy smell of allspice.  She still wanted to.  The longing itch hummed in her hand, deep and urgent as the maddening prickle of poison oak.  She rubbed the ball of her thumb absently across the smooth black plastic, trying to quell the sensation.

     "Well, how shall we get you up there?"  Seamus craned his neck to survey the steep, narrow stairs that led to the Gryffindor box.  "Bit too narrow for your chair, I think."  He casually spit on the grass at his feet.

     "We'll manage.  I've gotten through tighter spaces with Fred and George."  She rolled to the foot of the stairs.

     It would probably be best to levitate herself to her seat rather than try and Engorge the stairs.  Her mind may have put the near-disaster on the stairs to bed for the time being, but the embedded cells of her muscles had not.  They tingled with sudden apprehension, the hairs of her arms knotting in hard gooseflesh.  Her mouth puckered, the thin coating of spittle on her tongue evaporating in an instant.  Her heart began to thud painfully in her chest.  She did not want to go up those stairs.  Or any stairs.  No, no, not at all.

     _You've got to go up those stairs.  If you don't, you'll never be able to set foot on a staircase again.  Besides, those boys came to get you, and if you don't, they'll miss the match._

_     I didn't ask them to._

_     No, but they did it because they're your friends, and they wanted you to have a little fun.  That's what friends do._

_     I wish Professor Snape were here._  She cast a longing glance in the direction of the Slytherin box, where she could just make out his stern black outline perched among the crowd like a silent Grim.__

_     Well, he isn't, and he isn't going to be there the next time you need to climb the stairs.  He's got other things to do, and if you cling to his skirt, he'll break your fingers.  You've got to rely on yourself, girl.  You know that.  No one else is going to do it for you._

She fumbled her wand out of her robes, trying to grip it in numb, frozen fingers.  It rounded, fat tip jittered slightly in her hand, and its shiny surface was slick beneath her palm.  For the first time since she had been a bumbling, awkward first-year, it felt unnatural, leaden, in her tentative grip.  It was warm and cold and seemed to writhe maliciously between her crushing fingers.

     _Get a grip.  Your mind is the only thing you've got, and if you lose _that_, it's all over.  Take a deep breath and get moving,_

_     It's just a wand.  Your wand.  It's here to help you, not hurt._

     He was right.  It _was_ just a wand, and that made it dangerous.  It had no feelings, no loyalty.  It could be used against her just as easily as it could help her.  Wizards had been killed by their own wands, blown to pieces or scorched or simply felled without a single mark, as beautiful as porcelain dolls, but just as graceless and dead.  Wands were impartial, hunks of wood and feather or hair.  Wands killed and saved in equal measure.  She would only trust it as much as she trusted herself, and right now, her self-assurance was at its lowest ebb.

     She started to turn the wand on herself, then wavered.  "Um, Seamus, Neville, would you mind standing behind me while we went up?  I'm still a bit on edge from…earlier."  She had been about to say, "from nearly becoming abstract art on the castle floor," but changed her mind at the last moment.  No need to rub Seamus' nose in it.

     He caught a bit of her meaning anyway, it seemed.  His face, growing rosy from the heat and anticipation of watching a rousing game of Quidditch, went pale.  "Sure.  No worries.  Listen, I'm so sorry about what happened.  It was the bloody stupidest thing I've ever done, an' I could just-"

     She put up a hand to stop his burgeoning tirade.  "Hey, it's all right.  It was an accident, a mindless, idiotic accident.  Besides, you're not the one who conceived of the mind-blowing idea to go down the stairs backwards.  That was all me.  Just don't let me do it again."

     "You do, and I'll Transfigure you into a bronze statue.  Never leave the ground again," he vowed.

     She snorted at the image of being transformed into a crippled version of Rodin's _Thinker.  _She wondered how long it would take before she was covered in birdshit and squirrels nested in her dull bronze tresses.  She doubted she could count on Filch to keep up appearances.  Probably laugh each time he saw a fresh dollop.  Draco Malfoy might even happen by and wet her feet with a well-timed drizzle, little bastard.

     _Not unless you've got a bidet hidden in your works.  Little shit probably has an armed escort to go to the can.  Bet you my prize rooster that he doesn't even wipe his own ass._

     The image of water spurting from between bronze thighs while birds twittered and squirrels chattered flashed across her mind, and she guffawed, nearly dropping her wand.  Good Lord, Grandpa was on a roll today.  Bidet for Draco Malfoy was dead last on her to-do list, and she'd be damned if she'd do it, even if she were a lifeless bronze statue.

     "All right, Rebecca?" came Neville's anxious voice from beside her.

     "Just fine.  Just had a funny thought, is all."  She pointed her wand at her chest again.  Her hand shook for a moment, then stilled.  "_Automus Wingardium leviosa!" _

     The binding weight of the earth fell from her body, and she rose, hovering over the chair that had been her body, helpmate, and jailer for days uncounted, and would be for tens of thousands more.  An unbidden sigh escaped her, and her body shuddered softly from the shock of momentary liberation.  She floated there for moment, just feeling, and then, with a deliberate flick of the wrist, she pulled herself to bottom-most stair.

     The sun-warmed wood bit into her buttocks as she set herself down, and she grimaced.  The step groaned beneath her sparse weight, and she gave it a cautious, considering glance.  _Now I'm really glad I didn't Engorge the stairs._

     When she was certain she wasn't going to topple face-first into the dirt in front of her, she turned her wand on the chair and mumbled a Shrinking Charm.  It dwindled to the size of a handbag with a small pop.  "_Accio wheelchair!"_  Roles temporarily reversed, the object that cradled and chained her nestled unobtrusively in the palm of her hand.  She closed her recalcitrant fingers around it and tucked her hand to her side.

     "Ready?" she asked the two boys, who shuffled good-naturedly in front of her.

     "Absolutely," Neville said cheerfully.

     "Anytime you are."  Seamus gave a snappy salute.

     "Ok, then.  Here we go."  She turned the wand on herself again.  "_Automus Wingardium leviosa!_"

     She left the earth again and pivoted around, drifting slowly upward, small, eggshell feet dangling uselessly below her.  Her toes clipped each riser, and she ticked them off inside her head.  _One.  Two.  Three.  Please don't let me get splinters._

     Up they ventured, Seamus and Neville close upon her heels.  The higher they went, the more agitated she became.  Beads of sweat dotted her forehead, and she fought to keep the wand steady.  In her other hand, the wheelchair slipped treacherously.  Two-thirds of the way up, her heart was pounding so hard that she could feel the flesh of her breast jumping beneath her robes.  Her vision started to double.

     _I'm having a panic attack,_ she thought.  _Right here on the stairs.  Whee._

_     Don't you lose your head.  You fall here, and you take two people with you.  Tough it out.  You're a Stanhope, dammit._

_     You say that as though we were great warriors.  We're plumbers and dirt farmers.  Never the bravest sort, either.  Tosspots and rabblerousers, more like._

_     Aye, but we work hard, put our backs into it when we need to.  We don't collapse in a blubbering heap after a tumble down the stairs._

_     I nearly died, and oh, Jesus, I can't breathe._

_     That's your own damn fault, and don't you _dare_ fall apart on me._  Her grandfather reached into her mind, wrapped his ghostly, memory hands around the core of her, and shook, the hard calluses on his palm scraping across the fog of panic that was enveloping her mind.

     It was no use.  The terror was growing thicker, weighting her limbs and severing them from her central nervous system.  She saw them on the periphery of her vision, but they seemed outside her sphere of influence, pale trembling creatures not of her flesh.  Only the dim and fading heft of the wheelchair trapped between clammy fingers assured her that they were indeed hers.

     The hand holding the wand wavered erratically, making her weave and bob, and a monstrous spasm was building in her bicep.  The tension was hot and throbbing, making the skin of her upper arm ripple and crawl, as though it rested uneasily on her sinew.  She clamped the inside of her cheek in her teeth and willed it down.

     _Just let me make it to level ground.  Let them get away from me.  Goddammit, why does every day of my life have to be an exercise in misery?_

Her wand arm was stiffening, preparing to lash out at the air in front of her, and when it did, the Levitating Charm would be broken.  Back down the rickety stairs she would go, and this time Seamus and Neville would come with her.

     _Maybe I'm contagious after all, Madam Pomfrey, because if they survive this little tumble, they'll be sucking air through a ventilator for the rest of their lives.  Ha.  Haha._  _I Was Friend to a Gimp and All I Got Was This Lousy Wheelchair._  She gave an unbalanced titter.

     "All right there, Rebecca?" Seamus asked, clapping her reassuringly on the shoulder.

     "Lovely," she said airily, her voice high and strangled.  _We're all going to die._

     _Ask for help, damn you.  Don't take them with you._

     "Seamus, you might want to have your wand at the ready.  I feel a spasm coming on."

     "Right.  She heard the swish of his robes as he brought out his wand.  "Feel that?"

     "Yes," she said, flinching at the poke of his wand into the small of her back.

     "Don't worry.  I'll not let you fall again," he vowed resolutely.

     Marginally comforted, she continued her wobbly ascent.  The cramp in her upper arm was growing worse, forcing her fingers into gnarled claws.  Her wand teetered suicidally on the web of her thumb, and she held her breath, afraid that the slightest puff of air would send it spiraling downward.

     She pleaded with her rebelling fingers to close around the dangling, swaying piece of wood that was the only barrier between the three of them and a bone-snapping descent, but they were as stubborn as their master and did not move.  She cursed breathlessly, her eyes filling with desperate tears.  

     _Just one time, let things go right._

     Instinctively, she turned her head to look out over the pitch.  Dark shadows swarmed over the lush carpet of grass, players intent on the raging struggle above her head and oblivious to the one taking place twenty-five feet below their soaring brooms.  Her eyes froze on the black dot in the middle of the Slytherin stands.  Professor Snape, who had bought her an extra forty-five minutes of precious life with his alabaster hands.  Though he was not looking at her-his eyes were trained on the streaking figures above his head-she was directly in his line of sight, and if she tumbled now, he would see it.  See it and curse a waste of perfectly good magic.

     She gritted her teeth and pulled herself along.  She was close, so close.  Close enough to see the brilliant red hem of the Headmaster's robes.  The pitiless cramp in her arm was reaching critical mass, and the tears of panic and frustration rolled freely down bloodless cheeks.

     _The Headmaster was a Gryffindor.  Should've guessed._

     Her head swiveled in the direction of the Slytherin box once more.  Professor Snape sat just as he had before, as immutable as the mountains wrought by the hand of God.  His black cloak and robes were smooth and unruffled, and on his face he wore an expression of bland hauteur, a countenance that clearly held the belief that neither weather nor circumstance would best him, and that, though he found life unspeakably unpleasant, he would not quit it until he was ready.

     She surveyed his rigid, implacable form through tear-hazed eyes, blinking away the blurred edges and salty sting.  She could not, _could not_, fall.  She had to make it to the top of these stairs.  She would not be weak, would not acquiesce to the impudent demands of the worthless shell in which she lived.  She was better than that, greater than the pitiful sum of her parts.  She would not squander the reprieve he had granted her, probably against his better judgment.

      Her wand hand was shrieking now, the tendons little more than a hot, sizzling throb underneath her frozen skin.  The icy scald blazed from her fingertips to the gaunt protrusion of her wrist.  Her arm was a dead slab of coiling energy.  The nerves were overloading, sending staccato signals of distress to her tenacious brain that refused to let them through.

     _Allspice and parchment dust.  That's what bastards are made of.  _The nonsense lyric spun drowsily in her head, and for just a moment, though she knew it was only her wandering imagination, she thought she smelled him on the wind.  A smile played on her lips.

     _Ok, Professor, here we go._

_     Potting mulch, Miss Stanhope, potting mulch._

"I'll give you potting mulch," she muttered disagreeably.

     "Almost there," called Neville.

     Indeed, no sooner had he spoken than her feet scraped the final riser.  Panting with relief and exertion, she levitated herself the last few feet to the closest seat and collapsed there, clutching her agonized arm to her abdomen and letting it spasm and flail helplessly.

     "You all right?" asked Seamus, stumping up beside her and eyeing her shivering, convulsing limb with solicitous trepidation.

     "Yes, I'm Ok, I think.  Just not used to so much effort," she answered breathlessly, swiping her good hand over her red, sweaty forehead.  _No, I'm not all right.  In fact, I'm nowhere near; I nearly pissed myself, thank you very much, and the only reason I didn't is because I smelled Professor Snape from across the Quidditch pitch.  How does that grab you?_

     "I believe a chocolate frog is in order," said a jovial voice.

     Three startled head turned to see Headmaster Dumbledore smiling at them.  Rebecca realized with an abashed wince that she had unceremoniously seated herself on the bench beside him and Professor McGonagall, who, she saw with unhappy clarity, was taking in her disheveled, strained state with beady-eyed concern.

     "Maybe you should-,"

     _Please don't say it.  Please._

"-go to the Hospital Wing," she suggested, looking Rebecca up and down for signs of imminent collapse.

     _Maybe I should just _move_ there.  That way they won't have far to carry me when I go toes up from that mysterious calamity you see lurking around every corner, _she thought venomously, but she forced a polite smile and said, "Yes, ma'am.  Can I at least watch the match first?  It's so exciting, and the fresh air will do me good."

     McGonagall's face, hard with teacherly worry, softened, and the transformation was so stunning that Rebecca blinked in surprise.  Gone was the meddlesome, hard-nosed harpy that harried her steps and prodded indelicately at her thoughts, and in her place was a radiant witch glowing with girlish joy.

     "Of course, dear.  I remember when I was a young girl.  Quidditch days were such fun!  I used to be a Chaser in my school days, don't you know?"

     "No, ma'am, I didn't," Rebecca said, dazed by the swift change in demeanor. 

     "Had the time of my life up there.  Nothing like it.  Wind in your hair and rushing beneath your feet.  Tops, it is."  She beamed at her for a moment, and then returned her attention to the darting blurs streaking over the pitch.

     Before Rebecca could puzzle over why McGonagall had volunteered such information, a chocolate frog wrapped in bright gold foil materialized beneath her nose.

     "Chocolate frog?"  Headmaster Dumbledore beamed at her, smiling softly through his downy white beard.

     "Thank you, sir."  She took it gratefully.

     He watched placidly as she painstakingly unwrapped the foil, tearing it to pieces.  "There now.  Better?" he asked when she had at last managed to pop it into her mouth.

     She nodded, afraid to open her mouth and expose unbecoming chocolate teeth.

     Another agreeable silence as he gave her time to lick the sticky chocolate from the inside of her cheeks.  Then, "Are the pitch stairs terribly difficult for you, Miss Stanhope?"

     She paused, scouring the last of the chocolate from between her teeth and gathering her thoughts.  So he had seen her struggle.  She wasn't surprised.  She doubted there was much that he _didn't_ see with those wise old eyes of his.  She smiled ruefully.  "Not used to expending quite so much magic, sir.  _Especially not after going ass over tea kettle down four flights of stairs._  "D.A.I.M.S. isn't the most magic-intensive place." 

     "Mmm."  The Headsmaster was scrutinizing the bench and stairs thoughtfully, tapping his long, slender fingers on his beard.  "I'm afraid Hogwarts is a tad archaic.  The founders did not anticipate such an eventuality, alas."  He sounded apologetic.

     "Not many people do, sir," she observed calmly.  "Besides, I love it here.  Such a lovely place, full of charm.  I don't think I've ever had such fun."

     "That's the spirit," he said, radiating serenity.  His blue eyes were dancing behind his spectacles.

     She smiled at him, feeling nothing but confident happiness in his presence.  She had quite forgotten that she was perched hundreds of feet in air in an ancient grandstand, and in any case, it didn't matter.  He would never let anything hurt her.  As long as he was near, danger was far away, and everything was as it should be.  Even her body fell beneath his healing, soothing power, the spasming, trembling arm going still in her lap.

     He looked at the steeply descending stairs again.  "I'm sure we can come up with a thing or two.  Perhaps Professor Flitwick will be able to devise some Charms to make such ascents easier," he mused aloud.  "Indeed, I think he'd be positively delighted.  Been a few years since he's put on the proverbial thinking cap."

     She blushed, unconsciously ducking her head.  "Thank you, sir."

     "Not at all.  Having you here is a most welcome adventure."  He patted her paternally on one bony knee.

     She fell silent, unsure how to respond.  On the one hand, she was immensely glad and flattered by the attention and concern; it made her feel valued, wanted, and needed, but on the other hand, she wondered if such ready acceptance of well-meaning offers of help didn't mean Professor Snape was right about her.  What if she _was _weak and needy and dependent on the charity of others?  Hermione Granger certainly seemed to agree with him, prating as she did about her reliance on Winky.

     She sneaked a peek across the pitch to the Slytherin box, seeking out the strangely comforting sight of Professor Snape scowling at the players above his head as though they were bothersome gnats.  She felt vaguely naughty peeping at a rival Head of House from the safe eyrie of the Gryffindor box, but the feeling was not strong enough to make her stop.

     _Truthfully, what else am I going to look at?  McGonagall?  Rather shovel Borgergup puke._

     That was a weak justification for her constant surreptitious surveillance of her Potions Master, but the compulsion was inexplicable.  It was beyond her control, an entity unto itself, one that turned her eyes inexorably to wherever he happened to be.  For as long as he was in the room or in her line of sight, she could concentrate on little else.  She watched him, and he watched her, and they gathered wits and ammunition for the next inevitable clash.

     The silent, bloodless war raging between them was common knowledge to the Gryffindor and Slytherin students.  They lived precariously in its path, growing wise to the signs of impending confrontation, learning when to run for cover and when to freeze in plain sight.  All of them, even Draco, kept far away from them when the battle drew near, reluctant to become ravaged collateral damage.

     Whether the Hufflepuff or Ravenclaws were as aware of the bitter clash of wills was unknown.  She had little contact or interest in them, and save for Care of Magical Creatures, their educational paths never crossed.  The accepted pattern was Gryffindor paired with Slytherin and Hufflepuff aligned with Ravenclaw, the two sets of polar opposites working shoulder to each day.  She idly wondered whether anyone had ever noticed that fact before.

     _Notice it?  Child, they probably planned it.  One of those "fostering cooperation through forced interaction" fiascoes.  Harebrained claptrap is the plainer name for it.  Putting avowed enemies in a room together only helps them find newer, better ways of screwing each other.  Put Gryffindor and Slytherin in a room armed with nothing but shivs and rocks and see how far cooperation gets you.  And stop goggling at Snape.  That McGonagall is getting awfully interested in you._

     Startled, she shifted her eyes to the right.  As her grandfather had said, McGonagall had dropped her gaze from the happy furor of the match and was watching her with hooded, speculative eyes.

     _Still at it, are you?  Thought you'd given up that night I took tea with Professor Snape.  Should've known I wouldn't be that lucky._

     She forced her eyes away from the solemn figure in black on the other side of the pitch and turned her face upward to the sky.  The wind of passing players buffeted her face, and she closed her eyes, letting it wash over her in a warm breeze, tinged with the scent of sweat and heated wool.  It tickled her sparse eyelashes, and she gave a contented sigh.  All around her, the sonorous heartbeat of the collective soul of Hogwarts thudded dully, a deep, timbrous sound that vibrated in the sensitive soles of her feet and filled her eardrums with gentle pressure.

     When she opened her eyes again, one of the Gryffindor Chasers was directly above her head, the Quaffle tucked beneath an armpit.  Two Hufflepuff Chasers were bearing down on her, and Rebecca saw her loose plait swish as she turned her head, searching for an open teammate.  Her free hand clamped around the thin, smooth shaft of her broom, and she gritted her teeth in unknowing ferocity.  The Chasers were coming, and there was nowhere for her to go.

     _Come on, come on,_ Rebecca thought fiercely, her hands fisting in her lap.  The tart surge of adrenaline had returned to her mouth, but it was gleeful this time, the triphammer gallop of vicarious competition tapping in her chest and in her bones in delirious staccato rhythm.  Expectant sweat dewed on her palms, and the world stood out in vibrant, slow-motion clarity, the green of the grass so dazzling her eyes squinted against it.

     "Come on, Katie!" bellowed Seamus, his pale hands cupped to his mouth.

     "Yeah!" echoed Neville, clapping vigorously.

     Above them, Katie took action.  Realizing that time was running out and that her options had done the same long ago, she dropped the shaft of her broomstick straight down.  The air rushed up from beneath her, making her robes billow and flap.  The verdant carpet of grass sped toward her, engulfing her field of vision.  The weight of her stomach dropped to her knees, and then ricocheted into her throat, lodging there in a hot, hard knot.  

     At the last instant, she leveled off, the scuffed toes of her Quidditch boots hissing through the grass like striking serpents.  She was close enough to see individual pebbles in the dirt.  Behind and above her, the Hufflepuff Chasers gave dismayed shouts and pursued her, but she was gone, gone and laughing.  Blood, red and vital, coursed through her veins like molten lava, and perched astride her broom, she was gloriously and wholly alive.

     Watching her from her earthbound seat, Rebecca felt a thrill of longing empathy.  The look of controlled ecstasy on Katie Bell's face was a familiar thought to her.  Why shouldn't it be?  She had brushed fingertips with it on the fourth floor landing not long ago, though that had been of a different breed, more akin to the dark and lethal eroticism of heroin than the pure rush of life lived to the fullest that was jolting through Katie Bell's body.

     Many times over the course of her life, she had wondered what it would be like to dribble such undiluted freedom through her fingers.  Would it be soft and yielding like cool, cool cake flour, or jagged and cutting as coquina sand?  Maybe it was both, a double-edged sword the gored even as it liberated.  Whatever it was, she wanted it, envied those who had it with all the strength of her heart.  Nor was she the only one.  The thirst for it had been in every eye when the D.A.I.M.S. students and staff had gone to the Quidditch World Cup last year.  Even some of the staff had been affected by the unspoken lust for it.  Professor Trask, suffering from congenital, ataxic Cerebral Palsy and encroaching rheumatoid arthritis, had looked down at his twisted, gnarled hips in mute loathing, eyes dark as wet embers.

     The taint of ecstasy beyond reach had lingered for weeks after their return to the United States.  The mood had been sullen and tempers had flared.  Fights and verbal scuffles erupted like heat rash, and the number of students sent to the infirmary with spasms, convulsions, and panic attacks had trebled.  It was as though they were punishing themselves and each other for that which they had seen but could not touch.

     There had been other subtler signs, signs that only initiated eyes could see.  It was in the furtive upturning of searching eyes to the heavens with the coming of the twilight, the accounting of the twinkling stars in hearts that before had never stopped to consider them.  It was in the shadowy figures that dotted the discreetly fenced-in lawns and reached imploringly to the sky when they believed themselves to be beyond the scope of prying eyes.  She had been one of those, lifting her quivering arms toward the firmament and straining to graze fingertips against the cold, diamond edges of the stars, needing to feel the chilly coating of wish granting stardust cupped in her palms.  It had remained ever out of her reach, heartbreakingly close, but never quite close enough, and in the end she had turned from it with a venomous heart.  They all had, returning gradually to the hopeless, drowsy existence the powers that be had designed for them.

     They had not forgotten.  Their memories were long, and their resentments unshakeable.  They had simply buried the longing deep inside, beneath the craggy limestone of their stoicism.  They occupied themselves with the dreary toil of making it through day after colorless day.  At night, when the barriers between dream and truth were weakest, they turned sweet visions of leaving the earth between their shadowed hands, cherishing them even as they cursed the misery they brought.  

     George-at least she thought it was him-soared past, Beater club held aloft, eyes fixed on the action ahead of him

     "Go, George!" she shouted happily, clapping as hard as she could.

     Harry was circling the pitch, a scarlet goshawk on the lookout for the golden dormouse.  His robes flapped dramatically as he flew, billowing behind him like a proud herald.  From this distance, his features were indistinct, but his posture was relaxed and languid.  The burden he nursed behind those vivid green eyes did not lie so heavily on him now.  It was as though he left it behind, shaking it from the soles of his feet when he lifted into the sky.  He was alive and he was happy, and she could see by the eager twitch of his shoulders that he was glad to be free of his gilded cage.

     _How much pressure is he really under? _she thought, watching him dart after a glinting object on the horizon.

     _More than enough, I'd imagine.  He's breaking under it._

_     It's his own damn fault; he likes the martyr game.  He'll never walk away.  Everybody's superhero.  The Boy Who Lived.  The Boy Who Never Loses.  The Boy Who Never Makes Mistakes.  The Boy Who Pisses Rosewater.  If he hates it, if it hurts so much, he should just walk away._

_     Maybe he can't._

_     Oh, yes he could.  They would deny him nothing._

_     Except his freedom.  They need him.  They've become so dependent on him that they no longer remember a time before him.  They can't think around him.  They sure as hell don't think they can survive without him.  As far as they're concerned, he _is_ their world.  If they lose him, if he walks away, they lose everything.  Society crumbles.  Oceans sunder and stars crash down from the heavens.  They can't let him go.  Self-preservation is a voracious beast, and it will consume anything, no matter how beloved, to exist one more hour.  They'll break him like kindling if they think it will buy them their lives._

_     Bet Granger would love that thought.  How can he not resent them, turn his face away in disgust?_

_     Who's to say he doesn't?_

She watched him as he soared around the pitch, and even as the unending sea of her bitterness churned and writhed to see him flying so freely while she was forever shackled to the earth, she could not suppress a twinge of empathy.  To bear such a responsibility while you were still trying to struggle through the bracken swamps of your own twisted, uncertain emotions and your nebulous dreams was a curse worse than death.  His life was not his own, not truly, and people were all too willing to offer it up without a second thought should the need arise.

     _I'd run, run far, far away._

     _Would you?  Would you voluntarily give up your place in a world where you were a god?_

_     But the price is so high,_

_     Evidently he's willing to pay it._

_     I thought you said he had no choice._

_     Not anymore, he doesn't.  He had one once, and I guess he made it._

_     Bet he wishes he hadn't._

_     You know what they say about that…_

     Yes, she most certainly did, and she shoved the thought away before it could fully form.  The last thing she needed was to be hooting in disgusted laughter beside the Headmaster and Professor McGonagall.  She'd be sent to Madam Pomfrey for a once-over before her last snort had died away.  She forced herself to concentrate on the match.

     There wasn't much to see.  Gryffindor had things well in hand.  The score was ninety to thirty, and Hufflepuff was flagging badly.  Their Beaters were moving slowly, clubs drooping loosely from their hands, and the Chasers seemed wilted and dispirited.  Endurance was obviously not their strong suit.  Unless Harry and the rest of the Gryffindor team suddenly suffered a collective epileptic fit, she doubted the game would go on much longer.

     With nothing on the pitch to hold her attention, she found her eyes drifting once more to the figure of Professor Snape.  He looked supremely bored, she noted with amusement.  Indeed, he did not seem to be paying mind to the match at all; he was gazing balefully at those around him and mopping morosely at his brow with a handkerchief.  

     _Probably the same one he gave me to clean my face.  Must've gotten the filth out.  Don't imagine he's the sort to go collecting handkerchiefs.  _The fact that he still had it surprised her.  After the way he'd handled it, she'd been sure he was going to incinerate it and order a house elf to disinfect everything he owned.

     _Doesn't look like much of a sun worshipper, either, _pointed out her grandfather.

     The image of pasty, cadaverous Professor Snape sunbathing sans robes on the Hogwarts lawn came to her, and she chomped viciously on the inside of her cheek to quell hysterical laughter.  An undignified squeal still escaped her, and she rocked forward, muffling it with the back of her hand.

     Thankfully, her outburst was overshadowed by Seamus, who had leapt to his feet after a foul on the pitch.  Whether through fatigue or the desire to take _something _from this embarrassing shellacking, a Hufflepuff Chaser had collided with Angelina Johnson, and Johnson was sporting a spectacularly bloody nose.

     "Oi," Seamus cried, leaping to his feet, "watch where you're going, you ruddy idiot!"

     "Mr. Finnegan, please!" admonished McGonagall in a scandalized tone.  "One point for obscenity in front of a teacher."

     "Erm, sorry, Professor," he mumbled, sitting down quickly.

     "Very well," she murmured absently, but she was barely aware of him.  The whole of her attention was fixed on Rebecca Stanhope.

     From the moment the girl had set foot in the box, her eyes had been fixed on the Slytherin box.  On Severus Snape, to be more exact.  Right now, she was trying to fix her gaze on the figures flying above her head, but each time her eyes lifted to the horizon, they drifted back to that stolid, Puritanical form.  It was as though an unseen force were drawing her back, some mental telepathy that beckoned her attention from across the pitch.

     _Now Severus is a Svengali, is he?  Really._

     She knew it was ridiculous, but it just seemed so very odd.  Most students were repulsed by Snape, sensing his malicious, withered soul the way animals sensed weakness or disease among their number, and like most animals bent upon survival, they shunned him.  But Rebecca Stanhope did not.  Nor did she embrace him.  She watched, just as she was now, crouching low in her seat like a scientist studying a particularly deadly beast.  There was wariness, thankfully, but not nearly enough.  Curiosity was stronger.  She was like a kitting tugging playfully on a string, oblivious to what waited on the other end.

     Minerva was not oblivious.  She couldn't be.  For seventeen years, she had lived and worked in his dark, skulking presence.  She felt the hate radiating from him in palpable waves as he sat at the High Table, blighting her food, making it taste greasy and rotten.  She knew things that Rebecca did not.  She knew his past, understood, in small part at least, the circumstances that had forged him, twisted him in their bitter heat.  Forewarned was forearmed, and that girl was neither.

     _What is she doing?_

     Whatever it was, it was taking its toll.  She was terribly pale, and her small hands, awkwardly clutching her knees, were more fragile and ephemeral than when she had first arrived, something she would not have believed possible.  She looked positively ghastly.  Some of the other Gryffindor students, whom McGonagall had enlisted as lookouts, had told her that Miss Stanhope was returning to the Common Room far past the twelve-thirty curfew, and that she was often incoherent with weariness.

     Clearly, something _had_ to be done.  This was an unhealthy situation for her; for both of them, really.  She needed to be out making friends and exploring all the possibilities Hogwarts had to offer, not locked inside rank and fetid dungeons every waking hour of the day.  Merlin only knew what such a damp environment was doing to her joints.  Arthritis for the asking.  Not to mention her lungs.  She wasn't fit as it was; all they needed was for her to come down with tuberculosis or pneumonia.  She doubted it such a feeble body could survive such an onslaught.

     _Fine mess that would be, having to send our first transfer student home in a cheap pine box because our Potions professor worked her to death.  Be the worst international incident in a century.  The parents might even file charges.  You should be thankful there wasn't much publicity about her arrival.  The press would have a field day._

_     Rather callous view of things, don't you think?_

Well, it was true.  They _would _have a field day.  Education of pupils would become all but impossible, what, with story-hungry journalists crawling all over the grounds.  Dig up every bit of dirt, too, they would, and thanks to Rita Skeeter and Albus' hiring choices of late, there was plenty of that.  That simpering fraud Lockhart, a werewolf, the escape of a convicted criminal from the grounds-right under the Minister of Magic's nose, for Merlin's sake-the hiring of a loony ex-Auror who turned out to be, not a loony ex-Auror, but an escaped Death Eater presumed long dead.  Oh, yes, there would be more than enough grist for the mill.  Never mind that most of those incidents had been smoothed over; toss in a dead student and all bets were off.

     _Hogwarts has lost students before.  Moaning Myrtle, for one._

     Yes, but this time there would be no giant basilisk on which to blame it, only a hook-nosed, sallow, miserable man who probably never should have been given a position in the first place.  He would make a magnificent villain, Snape, and were the press and public content with just one scapegoat, things might not go so badly for them, but Hogwarts would never be so lucky, especially since the falling out between that idiot Fudge and Dumbledore.  There would be precious little help from the Ministry, and they would be frothing to come off looking well after the disastrous series of mishaps that had befallen them.  What better way to regain prestige than to put away a former Death Eater that had eluded justice the first time around and sack an eccentric headmaster that many prominent families regarded with disdain and suspicion?

     _You know bloody well why, and it's not because of anything he's done.  It's because he welcomes Muggleborns._

     The real why didn't matter as long as their righteous indignation was couched and cosseted behind the cause du jour.  The elitist Pureblood families would gladly raise a hue and cry over the death of a Muggleborn if they thought it would achieve their end of ridding themselves of Dumbledore and his troublesome morals.  She glanced to her right, where Albus sat watching the match and chewing contentedly on a chocolate frog.  Some of the chocolate had smeared into his beard.  She smiled fondly.

     _Circe bless him.  You'd never peg him to be one of the greatest, would you?_

     Many a person had underestimated him, taking his cheerful, placid, sweetly cracked demeanor at face value.  Down to the last, they had soon discovered the error of their ways.  First Grindewald and then Voldemort had fallen before his steely determination and peerless generalship, and in the fifty years between his two greatest adversaries, dozens more had been brought to heel by his powerful hand.

     Her eyes were drawn to Rebecca again.  She was still watching Snape, though every now and again her eyes would flit toward the sky.  She had a settled, fierce look about her, and her large eyes were sparkling with something she could not quite interpret.

     _This must stop.  For her own safety.  Albus may trust Severus' judgment, but I don't._

_     Do you still think he's a child molester?_  

      She sniffed and cast a shrewd, appraising glance at him.  Absolutely not.  She'd wager that Severus had last entertained a sexual thought when he emerged from between his mother's thighs.  Even as a boy, he had been sullen, uncommunicative, and withdrawn.  The young girls never noticed him.  By the same token, he never seemed to notice them, preoccupied as he was with cauldrons, tannins, alembics, and other tools of what would eventually become his trade.  He was quite content to be alone, and time had not done much to change his inclinations.

     Inculcation with his dark ideology was still a possibility, but if that were the case, then she was more confused than ever.  What could Severus possibly offer that child?  A lifetime of darkness and misery?  A chance to grow sallow and unwashed in a filthy, godforsaken laboratory while the sun rose and set and the hours of her life grew shorter?  A lonely, shuttered existence that no love would ever reach?

     _She may well already have that last.  Sad to say, young men are not apt to overlook the physical.  Nor are older men for that matter, _she mused, recalling a rather nasty episode with a drunk, boisterous sot at the Three Broomsticks some years before.

     Well, casting her lot with Severus was not likely to improve her odds.  The man had the social grace of a rampaging Quintaped, and his personal grooming left much to be desired.  It was highly improbable that Severus was going to dole out etiquette advice, but if she continued to spend a great deal of time with him, some of his behavior was bound to transmit itself to her.

     It was ridiculous.  Rebecca needed to be out in the sunshine and developing friendships.  She needed to be shown the beauty of life and all its untapped potential.  Yes, life was harsh, but it was not so all the time, and she should be shown that.  She needed a positive role model, and Severus just didn't fit the bill.  It was up to her to do something about it before it was too late.

     "Headmaster," she murmured, leaning next to his ear.

     "Yes, Professor McGonagall?" he answered pleasantly.

     "Sir, I-,"  She stopped.

     Rebecca's eyes, which for forty minutes had been riveted on Severus, had suddenly turned to her.  She was not looking directly at her; that would have been too audacious, too confrontational, and that was not Rebecca's way.  Her face was still turned toward the pitch, but her small head was cocked down and to the side, and her eyes had shifted to the toes of McGonagall's sensible black flats.  She was listening.  Intently.

     "Nothing, sir.  Perhaps we can discuss it later?"  McGonagall cast a meaningful glance at Rebecca's hunched back.

     The Headmaster followed her gaze, his eyes instantly losing their sheen of hazy, drifting contentment.  He stroked his beard, dislodging crumbs from the apple scone he'd eaten at breakfast.  "As you wish, Professor McGonagall."

     Before she returned her attention to the Quidditch pitch, McGonagall caught a glimpse of Rebecca.  Her face was twisted into a contemptuous leer, and she could see her narrowed eyes glittering with smug loathing.  She resembled Severus so much at that moment that she recoiled.

     _What has he done?  What has he done?_  The thought reverberated inside her head, the echo of an ancient curse, and it was all she could do to turn her eyes back to a game, that, for the first time in her long life, held no joy for her.

     After several excruciating minutes, Rebecca's eyes turned to the front again and settled on the black dot that was Professor Snape, the living enigma.  She watched and was watched in turn.  None of the surreptitious observers knew that in a little less than ninety-six hours, four paths would converge in an explosion of horror, confusion, and a desperate search for truth.

     November the first of 1996 was the last peaceful day Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry would know for three long, bloody, nightmare years.  The Second Inquisition was about to begin, and it would come from the most unlikely source.

 


	20. Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down

Chapter Twenty

     Severus Snape strode into the Potions classroom on the Tuesday following the Quidditch match in a state of gleeful anticipation.  Today was the day.  The Potter brat was finally going to taste bitter poison.  There was nothing to save him this time-no Tri-Wizard Tournament, no bumbling reporters, no Headmaster.  Unless a white-hot meteor crashed through the roof and crushed him into a mass of quivering jelly, divine intervention would be wanting this afternoon.

     _Though, _he mused, gliding to his lectern, _I'd take the meteor if it came to it._

He turned and looked out over the sea of upturned white faces half-concealed in flickering shadows, resting his palms on the cruel, splintered edges of his lectern.  They looked like half-buried pearls from his vantage point, their round eyes gleaming with curiosity and the dark thrill of spectacle.  The Gryffindor side of the room was fidgeting nervously, fingers plucking compulsively at loose threads.  Somewhere in the rear, a throat cleared.

     The Slytherin side, on the other hand, was positively seething with excitement.  Pansy Parkinson, who normally dribbled on herself during class, was awake and alert.  For once, she was not riveted on young Draco Malfoy.  She was staring at Snape.  Occasionally her eyes would drift to the dull brown desert of his desk.  She was looking, no doubt, for the potion, the evil elixir that would at long last bring down Harry Potter.

     Draco, too, was watching with an eager gaze.  He and his lackeys were perched in the highest corner, a king and his dull-witted sycophants observing the proceedings from gilded thrones.  It did not surprise him that young Malfoy was so keen for the experiment to begin.  He and Potter had loathed one another from the first, and more than once, they had come to wandpoint.

_    Finally met a creature more spoiled than himself.  Bit of a surprise for him._

     Either that, or it infuriates him that Potter is the only boy he could never bring beneath his heel.

     Of course he couldn't.  No product of James Potter's loins was ever going to be cowed.  Not by Voldemort, and certainly not by spoiled, feckless Draco Malfoy.  Draco would grow old and grey ere he ever slipped the leash around a Potter's neck.  Better had tried.  People had tried for centuries, generations, but the Potter bloodline had seemingly been wrapped in the blessings of the Fates.  No taint had ever touched it.  The whole smug lot of them had lived lives above reproach, lives almost holy in their serenity, and until the blood of Lily and James cooled beneath the silvery light of a weeping harvest moon, no tragedy had ever befallen them.

     Unfortunately for Draco and Miss Parkinson, none would smite them here.  The last of their line was not going to meet his end at the ivory hands of the Potions Master.  He was not going to waste his career and his life on the scrawny, underfed progeny of his childhood enemy, even if said progeny did happened to bear the fabled moniker of The Boy Who Lived.  That was why the potion he would be testing was not in plain view.  It was still in the locked, warded Potions cabinet.  He wanted no chance of contamination.  As much as he often longed for Potter to do him the honor of dropping dead, he had no desire to be responsible for his demise 

     He looked at Potter, smirking at the ill-disguised hatred he saw festering in those clear green eyes.  Who could imagine it?  The glory-child beloved of every heart, capable of hate, of black and dangerous malice.  No one would believe it.  They saw only what they wished to see.  It was there all the same, there and marked for him.  He supposed he should be honored.  He had managed the impossible.  He had earned the enmity of a saint.

     _In that, we are equal, Potter.  I hate you just as much as you despise me.  You and your father.  Your father, who never let me forget what he was and what I wasn't.  Bastard saved my life and made it seem more damnation than salvation.  I'll never forget that.  He won't let me; he died before I could repay him._

     He took in each and every face, surveying, marking, and finding them wanting.  Then he assessed them collectively with his sharp eyes, eyes trained to detect the subtlest nuances of color or convection.  Perhaps lesser men, more slothful, absent men, may have missed the things he saw, but he was not a lesser man, and he saw everything, including the invisible line of demarcation that split the room directly down the middle.

     The contrast was startling.  Night and day, the darkness and the light.  On the right, where sat the Gryffindors, hope shone from every face; confidence kindled in their eyes like spirit light.  Their backs were straight, free from the weight of low, poisonous expectation and the gazes of thousands waiting for the cataclysmic, inevitable fall.  They were assured of bright, limitless futures.

     On the left were the Slytherins, his children.  Assurance did not live there; swagger gave way to furtive slink.  They did not preen.  They were sly.  Their confidence was arrogance, self-reliance twisted by the prism of judgment.  Their eyes were hooded, calculating, and cautious.  The windows to their souls were closed, the shutters nailed permanently shut.  The darkness was as nurturing to them as the light was to the sons of Godric Gryffindor.

     Only one face distorted the flawlessness of the pattern, a pebble carelessly tossed into a limpid pool, sending shivering ripples in its wake.  Miss Stanhope watched him from her place beside the first desk on the first row.  She was not investigating now, prowling around the edges of his stronghold.  She was merely observing in that unsettling, persipicacious way of hers.  Her eyes never moved from his face, and there was an odd, lilting upturn to her thin mouth, as though she was pondering secret mirth.

     She may have been on the Gryffindor side of the room, but he was almost certain that was not where she belonged.  Her narrow face was too feral, too closed.  It lacked the bright, honest earnestness of her Housemates.  It was watchful and wary and aware.  Her eyes were not windows; they were mirrors, refractive, unflattering, and terrifyingly frank.  It was a face and a countenance that would be far more at home on the left side of the room.

     Yet he was not entirely sure of that, either.  Yes, she was standoffish and silent, preferring the solitude of her own thoughts to the inane jabber of her schoolmates.  She was slow and careful in expressing herself, and he sensed roiling bitterness swirling just below the surface of her skin.  In spite of these things, he could not quite accept her as Slytherin.  There was a dry, dusty honor about her that precluded such placement.  As cunning and thoughtful as she was, he doubted she possessed the vindictive ruthlessness to trample her enemies and sink the dagger into exposed throats, two things a tried and true Slytherin would do without hesitation.

     _A shriveled little riddle.  Do you even know where you belong?_

     She looked at him, and the mysterious Mona Lisa smile grew wider.  She knew what he was thinking, it seemed.  Par for the course.  She, like the rest of the class now seated expectantly before him, was a dichotomy.  She was not a child of the light-her deformity had robbed her of that lofty distinction-but neither was she wholly bound to the darkness.  She was a shadow-dweller, caught betwixt the two and wary of both.

     The incident on the stairs Saturday past was a perfect example.  When he had come across the foyer of the Grand Staircase and seen four wheels and a twisted doll racing toward the earth, he had been so stunned that his teacup had slipped from bewildered fingers.  For one crazy moment, he had thought it was Longbottom plummeting downward like a felled pigeon, that he had somehow gotten Stanhope's chair and driven off the edge; he would do something so foolish.  Then, he had realized that it was _her._  He had stared incredulously at her for the briefest flickering instant, and then instinct had taken over.

     He still couldn't understand it.  Never would he have suspected such unthinking stupidity from her.  She was always so careful, so deliberate in her actions.  Yet, for reasons known only to herself, the same eloquent mind that challenged and unnerved him on an emotional, gut level had conceived of the notion to navigate backwards through a door on the fourth floor of a castle whose staircases were known to shift.  

     He had seen countless acts of craven lunacy perpetrated with these walls by the unsettled victims of teenage pubescence, and he was keenly aware of the vagaries of the adolescent psyche.  The smallest slight was worthy of the most savage reprisal.  Six years ago, two sixth-year girls had come to blows over a runty, obnoxious seventh-year boy.  Three broken ribs, a broken arm, eight dislodged teeth, and a dislocated hip had been the final tally, and in the end, the object of desire had ended up with an unnoticed third party who had been watching from the sidelines.  Temporary insanity was the order of the day for the young.

     But Miss Stanhope was not young, not at heart.  The spirit that lurked behind those eyes was old, sullen with the accumulated knowledge of years one hundred times the span of her life.  There was no naivete in them, no shining, hopeful exuberance, only awful cognizance of how things were.  Life had been a harsh teacher, and its counsel had been cruel.  She should have known better; she _did_ know better, but she had done it anyway.

     It was a mystery he was not likely to solve, and at any rate, he was much more interested in poisoning Harry Potter.  The prospect of doing just such a thing had dangled before him, as tantalizing as forbidden flesh, for five years, and it was finally here.  There was nothing to snatch it from him now.

     "Today," he murmured silkily, drawing his finger seductively over the ragged edge of his lectern, "we will be testing poison antidote.  As I recall, it was Mr. Potter who volunteered to assist us in this endeavor."  He cocked his head and arched an eyebrow, silently daring Potter to contradict him, to vehemently point out that he had been handpicked and most certainly had not offered himself up.  When the only response was a surly, sunken-shouldered, defiant scowl, he smiled thinly.  "Let us hope that his Potions-making is adequate.  The consequences for failure can be quite nasty indeed."  He swept to his Potions cabinet.

     To the immediate left of where all the non-lethal ingredients were stored squatted a short, narrow armoire.  It, like everything else in the room, was a dull, unremarkable brown.  There was one distinguishing feature, however, that set this particular piece of furniture apart from the rest.  An enormous iron padlock, blackened with age, dangled heavily from the door handles.

     He reached into his robes and pulled out his wand.  He pointed it at the center of the armoire.  "_Finite aegis!"_

The air around the armoire shimmered and swelled, and then it thumped him in the chest, breaking around him in a gentle buffet.  The ward was down, and he stepped to the cabinet, pulling a thick iron key from his robes.  He fitted it into the lock and turned it with a deliberate flick of his wrist.  The sound of the tumbler falling back was very loud in the breathlessly silent room.  He smirked, enjoying the tension.  Then he quietly drew open the doors.

     Inside were the most toxic poisons known to the wizarding world.  They were arranged alphabetically, standing like well-ordered soldiers in clean, perfect phials and jars.  He ran a finger along the stoppers and jar tops, making certain that everything was where it should be.  He absently turned a jar of pure belladonna extract toward him, frowning.  It looked a bit foggy.  He held it up and reviewed the jar seal, trailing a fingertip along the outside edge.  It paused on a hairline crack, and he snorted in disappointment.  Contaminated.  He would have to throw it out and distill another batch.  He set it atop the armoire and went back to his spot inspection.

     He was meticulous in his care and storage of these ingredients.  Any one of them could cause rapid death if they were ingested.  The students in his charge were bullish and stupid; they seldom watched where they were going, and even more seldom did they bother to wash their grubby hands before swiping absently at their mouths and eyes.  Thus, the ward, which he had set up upon taking the position.  It was a ward that drew its magic from his own lifeforce.  Anyone who tried to breach the ward would be tapping directly into his physiological system, and he would be alerted immediately.  That way the little bastards could not poison themselves or each other by mucking about with deadly poisons.  It was a system that had worked flawlessly through the years.

     _Except for the time Potter or one of his cronies managed to snick some boomslang skin._

     The thought punctured the momentary pride he had been feeling, and he scowled.  That little incident still grated on him.  He _knew_ it was one of them.  He had suspected them from the first, especially after Miss Granger turned up in the Hospital Wing with symptoms which suspiciously mirrored someone suffering from botched Polyjuice Potion, but there had been no absolute proof, thanks to the havoc created by a Dung Bomb, and the matter had gone unsolved.

     _Well, Potter will get a measure of his comeuppance today,_ he thought with vicious satisfaction.

     The phial he was looking for was on the bottommost shelf, a small glass tube situated well apart from the jar of wolfsbane that also inhabited the shelf.  He scooped it up, careful not to touch the cork.  Though the chance of cross-contamination was infinitesimal, he didn't want to risk getting belladonna from the corrupted jar in the potion Potter would be testing.

     He closed the cabinet, picked up the jar of belladonna with the hand not holding Potter's decoction, and moved to his desk.  He placed the jar of belladonna on the center of his desk, bent down, opened the middle drawer, grabbed the jar, and placed it carefully inside.  He would dispose of it after the lesson.

     He straightened and went to the large, gargoyle-tapped sinks in the near corner, Potter's potion still held in the clean hand.  He set it carefully on the sink beside the leering tap and turned on the water.  He watched it while he scrubbed his hands with coarse mica soap, the astringent, medicinal smell making his nose hairs tingle.  He dried his hands carefully, rubbing the towel between all his fingers.  He turned off the tap with his wrists.

     He was being overcautious, and a part of him was disgusted with such obvious overkill.  He, Severus Snape, the professor that demanded all students be treated equally, even if it were only the equality of ruthless totalitarianism, was mincing around Harry Potter.  Here he was, scrubbing his hands like a nervous apprentice, simply because the test subject was the apple of Hogwarts' collective eye.  He hissed in self-reproach.

     The teacher in him knew better, though.  Such precautions were necessary.  Should something happen to Potter under his vigilance, it wouldn't take long for the fires of accusation and suspicion to smolder, and much of the blame for that could be properly lain at his doorstep.  He had been less than discreet with regards to his blazing antipathy toward the boy.  In fact, it become his trademark, his battlecry.  One need not ask him his views on Potter's vaunted status to know them.

     So he would err on the side of caution.  He retrieved the phial and once more returned to his lectern, setting it in plain view.  He rubbed his hands together thoughtfully and favored the class with a malevolent sneer.

     "The time has come," he said, eyeing Potter with black merriment.  When Potter made no move to come forward, he snapped, "Well, what are you waiting for?  Up here.  Now.  And fifteen points for making me tell you twice."

     Mr. Weasley opened his mouth to protest, a crimson flush rising in his cheeks, but a warning look from Miss Granger silenced him.  No doubt she was worried that an outburst would provoke further deduction of points, and that was something Gryffindor could ill-afford.  His campaign against Miss Stanhope had nearly been _too_ successful.  As of yesterday, Gryffindor was dead last in the point totals, boasting a mere one hundred and forty points, far behind third-place Hufflepuff, which held two hundred and thirty-six.

     Potter rose from his seat and slouched his way toward the front, hands balled in the pockets of his robes.  He was glaring at him with stony contempt, a fact Snape found highly amusing.  Did Potter really think so well of himself that he thought a look of curdling contempt would send him into a teeth-gnashing paroxysm of regret?  The idea was ludicrous.  The boy could stare at him in baleful reproach all he pleased, and all he would do was make him a very contented man.  He wanted nothing more from him, least of all his respect.

     The rest of the class was watching Potter's progress with dreadful, wide-eyed interest.  Many of those on the Gryffindor side were wearing expressions usually reserved for the most heinous of magical accidents, a fatal splinching or perhaps a drunken duel gone horribly awry.  Longbottom was trembling from head to toe; his desk rattled with the ferocity of his shivering.

     "Get a hold of yourself, Longbottom," he snarled.  "Five points from Gryffindor."

     The shivering stopped-for about thirty seconds.  Then it began again, worse than before, the desk legs chittering with frantic, staccato worry.  Snape rolled his eyes.  Longbottom was absolutely worthless.  How the bumbling fool had ever been admitted to Hogwarts was a complete mystery.  How he'd been Sorted into Gryffindor, the House which prized bravery above all things, was an even bigger one.  He'd never clapped an eye on a bigger coward.  The boy swooned at his own shadow; before detentions had become solely Miss Stanhope's domain, the sound of knocking knees had resounded through the Potions like the beat of defeated war drums.

     He briefly contemplated reprimanding Longbottom again, then dismissed the idea.  It would only make things worse, and if the boy shivered any harder, he would fall right out of the desk and bounce across the floor like a child's toy run amuck, quite probably running into Potter and breaking his leg along the way.  Potter plus a broken leg equaled no chance for humiliation, so he let the matter drop and turned his attention to the remaining rapt faces.

     Miss Granger's hands were folded on the desk in front of her, twisting and wrenching like uneasy white serpents.  She was chewing compulsively on her lower lip, and if she didn't stop soon, she was going to draw blood.  Her eyes were round and huge in her wan face, and her normally small adam's apple was engorged with nerves, bobbing erratically as she swallowed.  Beside her, Mr. Weasley was shuddering with suppressed rage, his short fingers curled into crescent fists.

     There was commensurate interest in the Slytherin side, though it was of an entirely different species.  Many were smiling openly, and those that weren't harbored mutinously twitching lips.  Goyle was sitting beside Mr. Malfoy, his mouth hanging open in what Snape supposed was a gleeful gape.

     _Don't dribble, _he thought.  Gregory Goyle was one of the stupidest pupils he'd ever had the misfortune to teach, perhaps _the_ stupidest, and only his father's association with the Death Eaters and, by extension, much of the upper echelon of wizarding society, kept him from being expelled and consigned to a life of menial labor and flophouse vagrancy.

     Draco Malfoy, possibly the sole reason for young Mr. Goyle's continued acceptance among the Pureblood standard bearers that were his contemporaries, was positively radiant with expectation.  His platinum blond hair threw off white crystal sparks in the uneven torchlight.  His smooth, aristocratic hands lay on the desktop, closed loosely, thumbs kneading gently over his forefingers.  His small silver eyes glinted with malignant happiness.  He obviously hoped for a calamitous retribution from his cunning Potions Master and Head of House.  In his tumorous glee, he reminded him of a fallen seraphim.

     Snape gave a barely audible huff of dour amusement.  If only he _could_ mete out as much vengeance as the class seemed to expect.  Unfortunately, the "poison" in the phial was really nothing more than the Advanced Sleeping Draught they had been brewing last Thursday.  If prepared correctly, all it would do was send Potter speedily and thoroughly to the land of Nod.  He'd drop like a sack of bricks and be snoring before he hit the floor.

     At least, that was the way it was _supposed_ to go, all things being well and equal.  The Advanced Sleeping Draught on his lectern was neither well nor equal.  Indeed, it was abysmal.  Potter had spent far too much time muttering clandestinely with Granger and Weasley, and his decoction was a mess.  Too thick, too pale, too shoddy, and utterly impotent for its intended purpose.  It would, however, make an excellent emetic.

     _James Potter would be spinning like a top in his grave if he knew his only son were about to spend the next five minutes vomiting out the contents of his stomach._

     The image of smug, swaggering Potter retching uncontrollably before a class of his peers sent a shiver of cold delight into the pit of his stomach.  Too bad there wouldn't be a camera here to capture the moment.  If only that bothersome Creevey boy, the one who followed Potter about like a gnat in search of the sweet nectar of sweat, were a year older.  He could finally be put to good use.

     "Hurry along, Potter," he snapped, impatient for the entertainment to begin.

     Potter, shambling forward most unenthusiastically, quickened his pace, but not by much.  His green eyes were boring into the lectern, flashing with insolence and disdain.

     _If you hate me so much, boy, then why don't you rush to the duel?  Is it because you know you can't win, that this time, there will be no saving grace?  Or is it because you don't consider me a worthy opponent?_  He felt the unfamiliar tug of a smile at the corners of his mouth.

     While he waited for Potter to complete his reticent trudge to the front of the room, he examined the potion one last time.  He tilted it this way and that, holding it up to the wan torchlight.  He winced as he watched the milky, curdled liquid crawl truculently from one end of the phial to the other.  This was going to taste horrendous.  His mood brightened even further.

     From the corner of his eye, he saw Miss Stanhope, and her demeanor was so disconcerting that he slowly lowered the phial and stared at her.  She was absolutely still.  She didn't even seem to be breathing.  An image came to his mind of a white hare, petrified and quivering beneath the predatory, silver-eyed gaze of a fox.  It was right, and yet it wasn't.

     _Which is she, the hare or the killing fox?_

     He couldn't tell.  She exuded no fear, but she did not give off the air of a stalking hunter, either.  She was both, and she was neither.  As he watched, she blinked, the only movement she had made since he had first noticed her behavior.  He found himself quite disconcerted by such unnatural stillness.  She was frozen, an eerily life-like puppet whose puppeteer had gone off in mid-performance.  Even her eyes were odd, blue buttons pushed inside her skull.  He had never seen her look that way before, not even in her fiercest concentration.

     Then Potter arrived at the front of the room, and her head swiveled to mark him.  As soon as she saw Snape, her eyes cleared, life seeping into them again, the ocean tide returning to long-abandoned shoals.  The secretive Mona Lisa smile returned, and she inclined her head imperceptibly, as if to say, _scrutiny duly noted, sir._

     _Smug little strip,_ he fumed silently, irritated at the sheer presumptuousness of the gesture.  He would set that to rights as soon as he dealt with Potter.

     He watched her for a moment longer and noted with interest that her eyes had shifted to Exhibit Potter again.  This time, though, they lost none of their shine; rather, it intensified, becoming a rapt glow, not unlike the expression borne by Malfoy at the moment.  He could tell by the taut set of her body that she was as eager as the rest of them to see the commencement of the spectacle.  She was also studying, pondering, gathering information that perhaps only she could interpret.  Whatever she saw must have pleased her, because her upper lip curled in a sardonic, mirthless smile.  Her canines were long and glistening in the dim light, a bizarre optical illusion that made him blink once to clear it.

     "You finally decided to join me, Potter.  How kind of you," he snarled, taking out his unease on the best possible target.  He uncorked the phial of Advanced Sleeping Draught and placed it carefully on the edge of the desk nearest the door, right beside the fidgeting boy wonder.  "Ready, Mr. Potter?" he sneered quietly, his disquiet ebbing at the prospect of finally taking a peg or two from beneath the legendary Boy Who Lived.

     "Yes, sir," he muttered, his voice barely audible in the heavy gloom.

     "What was that?  I'm afraid I didn't hear you."

     Potter's mouth worked, and he could see the gears of the boy's self-absorbed mind clicking, grinding, and clacking as he dug through the rubbish heap of his mind in search of witty rejoinder.  Snape settled in for a very long wait.

     At some point, Potter reached the inevitable conclusion that there was no scathing reply on hand.  He heaved a monstrous sigh and said through gritted teeth, "Yes, sir."

     He thought he detected rather more asperity than was necessary, and the irascible tyrant in him smiled.  "Mind your cheek, Potter," he purred almost pleasantly.  "Twenty points for insolence.  "One would think you would keep a civil tongue in your head when addressing the man who could be handing you lethal poison."

     Potter sputtered in inarticulate, impotent fury, and Snape permitted himself a small smile.  This was turning into one of the best days he could remember.  He supposed he was enjoying this a trifle too much, but who cared?  He had spent the last five years watching over the ungrateful little sod, making sure that he wasn't done in by his own rock-headed bravado, and another ten years before that swearing before Voldemort that he truly hadn't the slightest idea where the Potter spawn was hiding, repeating the boldfaced lie even as his body writhed and convulsed beneath the agonies of the Cruciatus Curse.  Why shouldn't he enjoy a moment of brightness in his otherwise drab life?  That said brightness should come from draining the joy from the life of Harry Potter made no difference.

     When, after several minutes, Potter had not picked up the phial, Snape grunted in exasperation.  "Well, what are you waiting for?" he hissed.

     Just as he was reaching a tentative hand for the potion, the door to the classroom crashed open, making everyone jump.  Rebecca punted the air in front of her, huffing in consternation.  A small, white and black blur that he barely had time to register as Colin Creevey burst in.

     "Merlin in a topcoat!  What are you-,"  He stopped, frozen in the mortified awareness that all his carefully planned merriment was going to be for naught.  Divine intervention was going to rob him again.

     Creevey, upon making his grand entrance, crashed into the near corner of the desk, causing the full phial to teeter and wobble wildly.  Potter, staggering from the frantic nudge, made no attempt to catch it, and Snape knew he was simply too far out of reach.

     _Of all the wishes I have ever idly flung to the heavens, why did the Fates see fit to grant _that_ one? _he lamented morosely, recalling his rash wish for Colin Creevey and his blasted camera.  Well, here was Creevey, and he had brought, not his moment-preserving camera, but his trademark penchant for improbable disasters.

     Then, miracle of miracles, Creevey, who heretofore had demonstrated the physical dexterity of a Flobberworm, darted out one spindly hand and caught it, pressing the flat of his hand over the open top and keeping the potion inside.  The gelatinous glop bubbled inside its crystal prison, but it did not, as Snape had feared, splatter all over the dungeon floor.

     Sharp, labored breathing was the only sound in the room, and through the red haze of his fury, Snape realized that it was coming from Miss Stanhope.  He tore his gaze from Colin Creevey, who stood rooted in from of him in mute terror, comprehension of the miserable fate that awaited him dawning in bulging hazel eyes, and looked at her.

     She was sitting as she had been a moment before, but her pale face was contorted in pain, and she was clutching her leg in one stiff, shaking hand.  She was swallowing hard and clearly forcing herself to take deep, even breaths.  Her eyes met his, but she said nothing.  She gritted her teeth, and he saw a muscle behind her hand jump.

     _Bloody hell.  A spasm.  Now, of all times,_ he thought furiously.  "Miss Stanhope," he snapped.  He made no move to go to her.

     "Yes, sir?" she said calmly, though he could hear the cost of such control in the strained timbre of her voice.

     "Are you all right?"

     A swallow.  Two breaths.  "Yes, sir.  Just a cramp."  She belied her composure with a low grunt.

     "If you are going to fall down in shrieking, frothing convulsion, proceed at once to the Hospital Wing," he murmured dismissively.  _One disaster at a time._

"That won't be necessary, sir," she managed, biting back another grunt.

     It occurred to him that she was not at all fond of the Hospital Wing.  At the mention of it, her eyes, which had been misty and dark with pain, had flashed with contempt, and mixed with that contempt had been fear, a fear as healthy and potent as a rose blossom planted at midnight in the soil from a murderer's grave.  The contempt he understood; it was an attitude in which he and Stanhope were in perfect accord; lying in a medicinal-smelling bed while silent, pointy-headed Mediwizards prodded you and ordered you about as though you were a drooling imbecile was a reprehensible existence, and he would avoid it whenever he could.  But the fear was something altogether different.  He filed it away for future reference and rounded on Colin Creevey.

     "Mr. Creevey."  He said nothing more for the moment, just stood there, quiet and unflinching as impending death, and let him soak up the singsong menace in those words.

     Eyes wide as pie-plates, Colin Creevey's left hand, the one holding the ruined Advanced Sleeping Draught, came up in a dreamy, automatic swing.  His lower lip was quivering, and he was watching him as though he expected Snape's lily hands to fall around his throat.

     Snape plucked the unwittingly proffered phial from sweaty fingers and replaced it on the center of the desk without taking his eyes off the petrified Colin.  "Mr. Creevey," he said again, voice low and silky with dangerous interest, "what madness seized you to come blundering into my Potions classroom like a stampeding water buffalo?  Diptheria?  Plague?  Delirium tremens?  A brain fever, perhaps?"  With each listed ailment, his voice went softer and lower, until Creevey was actually rocking forward on his toes to hear him.

     Creevey's eyes rolled in their sockets, and his teeth clicked together, and when he finally managed an answer, he sounded like a man in the final stages of hypothermic shock.  "No, sir," he squeaked eyes darting to the open door of the classroom as though it were the last bastion of sanity left in the world.  "I h-h-have a m-m-m-m-message from P-Professor M-M-M-McGonagall."  His other arm shot out, and from his shuddering fingers dangled a mightily squashed parchment which the boy had all but throttled in his anguish.

     He deftly moved to block the door, wrenching the outthrust paper from the boy's grasp.  This was the last thing he wanted.  If it was a note prying Potter from his clutches, he was going to fold it up, put it away, and hex Creevey into an irreversible coma.  The old bag was constantly meddling in his plans, and it would be just like her make a last-minute rescue of her precious brat.  He gingerly unfolded the parchment, ignoring Potter's hopeful gaze.

     _Severus,_

_     Please join me in Headmaster Dumbledore's office as soon as possible to discuss your relationship with Rebecca Stanhope._

_     Professor Minerva McGonagall_

          He stared incredulously at the parchment, suddenly unable to breathe or feel his fingers.  His head was filled with a strident, unpleasant buzzing, and his eyes could only focus on a single phrase.  _Your relationship with Rebecca Stanhope._  It was incredible.  It was appalling.  The grouping of those particular words in that order sent an iron mallet into his gut.  She couldn't possibly think…  He looked at the words again, hoping he had misread them the first half-dozen times.

     _Your relationship with Rebecca Stanhope._

She did.  She truly did.  His hands, gripping the edges of the parchment so tightly that his nails bit into the paper, shook.  His eyes no longer worked properly.  Everything had faded into the shadows except for the flowing script of that single line.  _That _stood out in brilliant, glowing relief, leaping from the page in a band of blazing red.  For one hellish instant, he was reminded of the way the Dark Mark had shone just after it had been seared into his left forearm.

     He felt sick and furious.  How dare she!  How _dare_ she!  He would never…  Never.  The parchment rattled drunkenly in his fingertips.  His heart was a thudding ball of savage hatred inside his chest.  His mouth was frozen shut; his teeth ground against one another, scraping back and forth like the shifting of tectonic plates.  His pulse hammered at his temple so hard he thought it might split his skull.

     _Self-righteous, presumptuous prig.  Of all the things…  _His thoughts trailed off.  Coherence was no longer possible.

     He looked up, the tendons in his neck creaking audibly.  The first person he saw was the unfortunate Colin Creevey.  Never averse to flaying the messenger in the best of times, he now unsheathed his poisoned rapier and plunged it into the boy with unseeing fury.

     "You.  You interrupted my class for _this?_" he hissed, waving the parchment in front of Creevey, who, behind the glaze of congealing terror in his eyes, was composing his last will and testament.

     "P-P-Professor McGonagall said it was important, sir."

     "Oh, I'm certain she did.  And being the good Gryffindor you are, you hurried right along to deliver it," he hissed, eyes blazing.

     "I just thought-,"

     "Thinking, were you?  Stop.  It doesn't become you.  While you were thinking, did you ever stop to consider that you might be interrupting something far more important than what was scribbled on this parchment?"  He snapped the paper in question in front of Creevey's bulging eyes.

     The capacity for speech appeared to have abandoned Creevey.  All he could muster were inarticulate, fearful gibberings.  Snape saw his eyes flick to Potter, who was watching in slack-jawed astonishment.

     "Think Potter is going to save you, do you?  Your hero, Potter, who shuns you at every turn."  He whirled around to face Potter, who took an involuntary step backwards.  "Go on, Potter, save him," he commanded, jabbing a finger at a quaking Creevey.

     Potter made no reply, merely shifted his feet and stared at him in silent outrage.

     "Well, go on.  Be the hero, Mr. Potter."

     "I'm sorry, sir," Creevey nearly wailed.  "I was just-,"

     "Not another word, Mr. Creevey.  Not a single one."  It was nearly a whisper.

     He forced himself to relax.  It would only bolster McGonagall's suspicions if he lost himself now.  He would handle this as he always had, with cold dignity and measured thought.  Emotions would only complicate matters.  He pried his jaws apart and made his fingers uncurl.  He did not speak again until his heartbeat had returned to normal.

     "Mr. Creevey," he said without turning around, "please tell Professor McGonagall that I will be along as soon as class has ended."

     "Y-yes, sir," breathed Creevey, pathetic in his relief.

     "Oh, and Mr. Creevey?"  He spun around to address the boy's fleeing back.  It froze, tensed and waiting and filled with a dreadful knowing.  "When you leave this room, the Gryffindor point glass will be empty.  Send Professor McGonagall my warmest regards."

     Creevey disappeared, and there was a murmur of outrage from the right side of the room.  Miss Stanhope was watching him thoughtfully, and he turned away from her, sure that she could see the churning abyss of his emotions.  He picked up the phial on the desk.

     "Now, Mr. Potter, where were we?"  He held out the phial.  

     With misgiving written all over his face, Harry Potter reached for it.

     "Bottoms up," Snape purred, folding his arms across his chest.

     For a moment, it looked as though Potter was going to refuse.  He had that maddening steely glint in his eye that he knew all too well, the one that said he was giving serious thought to letting the phial slip through his fingers and crash to the floor, letting it shatter in a spray of glimmering shards.  _Oops, so sorry, Professor,_ he could almost see that insolent mouth saying, _what an unfortunate accident.  _He would be most contrite, but, he, Snape, would know the truth.  He would see it crouching in those vivid green eyes and greeting him with a mocking twinkle.

     _Do it, boy, and you will never see another happy hour.  I will extinguish every spark of hope you ever entertain, and if the gods should choose to punish me by inflicting your spawn upon the world, then I will strip them of joy and zest as well.  I will never let it rest._

     Some of his thoughts must have reflected in his face, because Potter, after sparing him a last desultory glance, tipped the contents of the phial into his open mouth.  He grimaced and gagged as the foul mixture struck his tongue, his body reflexively rejecting the corrupted liquid.  His hand convulsed around the empty phial, and he dropped it, fingers flying up to cover his twitching mouth.  It shattered with a sharp, agonized tinkling.  He doubled over, stomach heaving.

     Snape watched dispassionately, fingers drumming softly against his forearms.  He made a mental note to deduct House points the next time Gryffindor had any to deduct.  Forty points for the lost phial.  The boy was now retching violently, hands gripping his knees, shaking knuckles bone-white.  They made a startling contrast to his face, which had gone a deep, hot red from the force of his exertion.

     "You've soiled my floor, Potter.  You will remain behind and clean it up."

     Potter gave him a watery, miserable gaze, spittle dribbling down his chin.  He opened his mouth to reply, but all that emerged was a stream of green bile.  Snape calmly stepped back from the mess, smirking.  He was thoroughly enjoying himself.  Potter hardly resembled the aloof, cocksure boy that irritated and troubled him without end.  Of course, one would be pressed to exude confidence while drooling vomit.  As he watched, a clot of it splashed onto the front of Potter's robes.

     _Not so invincible now, eh, Potter?  James?  It may be petty revenge, but it is all I can well afford.  Killing him would give me great pleasure, but unfortunately, the little ass may be our only hope.  So I'll just cherish this moment.  I doubt I'll have another like it._

The retching had gained an urgent, almost desperate quality, as though Potter's stomach lining was wrenching loose from its moorings.  Very little was coming up now, just the barest flecks of thick yellow bile.  The sounds coming from him were guttural, glottal groans that reverberated throughout the classroom, sputtering out each time his throat closed.  

     They reminded Snape of the noises a dying cur had made after the administration of acutely lethal Trisomos Draught, a brew designed to strip away the flesh of vital organs, culminating in a hole appearing in the victim's stomach as the poison worked its way out.  It had taken ninety-four minutes for the animal to die, howling, thrashing, and spraying rich, red, lathered foam from its muzzle.  Ninety-four minutes to the second.  It was a number he remembered clearly because he had written it in his flowing, cultured hand as he sat on the pavement a few feet away, an hourglass at his feet.

     Watching Potter struggle suddenly lost its novelty; it was resurrecting memories he would much prefer to leave buried.  There was another wrenching gag, and he saw thick bile drop from the boy's mouth.  He stepped forward and looked down to see bright flecks of blood mixed with the saliva.  He frowned.  That shouldn't be.  True, Potter was retching violently, but it took much longer than three minutes to produce the damage necessary to bring up blood.

     He reached into the pocket of his robes and brought out the antidote he had prepared that morning.  That was enough.  He held it out to the boy.  "Here.  Drink it quickly."

     Potter reached for it, but his movement was wavering and unsteady.  His fingers closed weakly upon the air two inches in front out the outstretched phial.  They slowly opened again and hung there, trembling spasmodically.  His eyes were glazed and dull.

     "Take it," he ordered, thrusting it violently into his palm and holding it there, but Potter's boneless fingers did not close around it.

     _Something has gone wrong,_ he thought, the unfamiliar feeling of panic rising in his stomach like indigestion.  He felt his chest tighten.  _Don't panic.  You're in control here.  You always have been._

     But as he stepped around the ominously tottering Potter, he knew he had never been in less control.  A simple exercise in humiliation had spiraled into a waking nightmare.  Time had slowed to an interminable crawl, and everything stood out in hideous detail.  The drunken way Potter lurched and swayed on his feet, his puffy, swollen eyes.  The way his hands dangled nervelessly on the ends of his arms.  The smell of vomit was heavy and pungent in the stale air, and the smell of his own tangy sweat struck him like a blow.

     He uncorked the phial of antidote, flinging the cork aside and grabbing the boy by the nape of the neck.

     "Drink it, damn you," he hissed, yanking Potter's head back and forcing the liquid down his throat.

     Some of the deep blue liquid dribbled from the corner of Potter's slack mouth, but most of it disappeared at the back of his throat.  He let the phial slip from his frozen hands.  It struck the toe of his boot and clattered across the floor.  He did not hear it.

     _Come on Potter, come on.  Wake up.  This is not happening.  You were only supposed to be sick.  Look at me._

     The class was looking at him in silent horror.  Some let their mouths dangle bonelessly open.  Others were gripping the edges of their desks, fingernails digging into the wood.  Many were weeping, tears coursing down papery cheeks.  Granger was rocking back and forth in her seat, making strangled whimpers of terror.  Beside her, Weasley was staring at him with huge, disbelieving eyes, and the first wisps of suspicion were kindling there.  He saw it in the shadowing darkness that blotted out reason and coronaed his irises like rapidly forming cataracts.

     _He thinks I did it.  Merlin help me, he thinks I tried to kill Harry Potter.  _

     Nor was he the only one.  The same expression of dazed accusation was blooming on other faces, spreading with the languid efficiency of a forest fire.  It leapt from one face to the next in terrifying succession.  The Slytherins drew away from him en masse, a black-haired girl in the front bursting into tears.

     _I swear I didn't_, he wanted to shout at them.  _I've spent fifteen years protecting the ungrateful miscreant.  Why would I throw it all away by poisoning him in front of forty witnesses?_

     "Granger, go for Madam Pomfrey," he said hoarsely.

     Granger remained in her seat, rocking dreamily.

     "Granger," he snapped, and this time she jumped, coming to herself with a small shriek.  "Go get Madam Pomfrey.  Now."  

     She jumped jerkily from her seat and headed for the door, scissoring on shaking legs.  Snape thought crazily about a stilt walker he had once seen at a carnival as a child.  The man hadn't been very good; his gait had been clumsy, wobbling precariously with every step.  Granger looked that way now-disconnected and vague.  He prayed she remembered where she was going.

     Potter went limp in his arms, and he cursed silently, lowering him to the floor and kneeling beside him.  The boy's lips were blue, and his breathing was little more than a wheeze.

     _He's had an allergic reaction.  Merlin, he's suffocating.  What in the hell happened?  He's worked with these ingredients a thousand times before.  Never so much as a rash._

     He mentally urged Potter to keep breathing.  If he stopped, he wasn't sure how to resuscitate him.  His medical knowledge was limited to the realm of bubbling antidotes.  The shallow, ragged breathing continued, and just below it on the range of his hearing was the sound of muffled weeping.

     He tore his gaze away from the feebly rising chest beside him, and looked up at the class.  They were still staring at him, transfixed with numb horror.  Draco was gazing at him in rapt admiration, and he quashed the need to bury his face in his hands.  He recognized that look.  It was an expression of unadulterated hero worship.  Clearly, Mr. Malfoy thought he had brass tacks, indeed.  Probably be writing to his father about it this very day.

     _If he does, it may buy you more time.  Voldemort might stay his hand.  It doesn't take a genius to see you're on his short list._

     He hissed through his teeth.  He was well aware that his time was running out.  Voldemort had been watching him ever since Potter's first year.  He knew.  Like his archnemesis, Dumbledore, Voldemort was apprised of everything, omniscient.  He saw his treachery as clearly as he saw the mark he had once branded there.  He was only toying with him now, keeping him about as a form of entertainment, a pet to torture when he was bored.  The hours of his life were short.  It was only a matter of time.

     _Even if your perceived poisoning of Potter curries his favor for a time, the suspicions will grow again.  The torture will return, and when you no longer scream loudly enough to suit him, he will kill you._

     The Ministry may get you first.  If Potter dies, it's Azkaban for you.

     "You bloody bastard!  You killed him!"  Mr. Weasley had found his voice at last.

     "Mr. Weasley, go get the Headmaster at once," he barked.  If he let him get going, the panic would infect them all.

     Weasley made no move to do as he was told.  He glowered, hands balled into tight fists.  His eyes were huge and manic.  "You've been trying to kill him for years, and now you've finally done it, haven't you!" he spat.

     "Your beloved Potter isn't dead, Mr. Weasley, but he very well may be if you don't go for the Headmaster," he snapped, trying to maintain his composure amid a tidal wave of confusion and anger.

     _Circe, where is Madam Pomfrey?_  

     The fact that Potter was still alive finally clicked in Weasley's brain, and he bolted from the room, his footsteps thundering in the corridor.  Left alone with a dying Harry Potter and a room full of terrified faces, he looked helplessly around, counting the rasping breaths coming from the boy at his side.  After a while, they seemed to match his heartbeat.

     _One.  Two.  Three._  Perfect synchronicity.

     A sharp inhalation caught his attention, and he turned his head.  Stanhope had retreated from her desk and was pressing herself against the wall.  Like the others, her eyes were bright with terror, but she was not looking at him, the saint killer with blood on his hands.  She was looking at the rest of her classmates.  She slowly brought her hands to her mouth and let out a muffled whimper.  She was drawing in on herself, pulling her knees and shoulders close.  Parvati Patil shifted in her desk, and Stanhope recoiled so violently that she nearly cracked her skull upon the wall.  Her chest was heaving with silent sobs.

     _She's terrified.  But of what?  They're not even looking at her.  They don't even know she's alive.  Right now, the prone body of Harry Potter is all they can see.  What is it?  What does she see?_

     Then she looked at him, her blue eyes brimming with tears.  Her hands convulsively kneaded her mouth.  A noise sounded to her right-the shuffle of feet-and her head snapped in that direction, her body jumping in surprise.  She was close to hyperventilating, her breath coming in great, whooping gasps.

     _She's coming apart.  The last thing I need is for her to keel over._

     "Stanhope, get a hold on yourself," he snapped.

     He gaze returned to him, and he saw her make a desperate effort to regain control.  She swallowed.  Then her mouth began to move.  She was talking, but there was no sound.  It was as though her vocal cords had been severed.  Just the barest whisper of air across her lips.

     _They're coming for you, sir.  _

The words jolted something inside of him, a nearly forgotten dream.  An image of himself standing before an open door and hearing an awful clittering floated through his mind.  Someone had said something to him then, but he could no longer remember it.

     _No, but I think she does,_ he thought suddenly, watching Stanhope flinch away from Seamus Finnegan as though he were approaching her with hot tongs.  

     "What are you talking about, Miss Stanhope?" he asked softly.

     _Get away.  Get away, _was her only answer.  Her eyes darted incessantly between him and the class, and she shook with terror.  _Get away._

Whether warning or plea, he could not tell, and before he could answer, footsteps heralded the arrival of Madam Pomfrey, the Headmaster, and the end of the world as he knew it.       

          __

     __


	21. The Silences Between

A/N:  As of June 21, this story became AU.  As such, certain facts will no longer jibe with canon.  This story will continue as planned.  Reasonable accommodation to canon will be made where possible, but intra-story integrity will be preserved.  Dedicated to Alan Rickman, who made this interpretation of Snape possible, and to the BBC's Ouch.com, who brightened what has become a very dark path.

Chapter Twenty-One

     Snape sat in a chair in front of the Headmaster's desk, his head buried in his hands.  The world had gone mad.  He was no longer certain of the day or the hour.  Everything seemed to be moving so slowly.  Even his own breathing was slow and labored, as though a great weight had settled upon his chest.

     _What was it the superstitious medieval Muggles did to suspected witches and criminals?  Ah, yes, pressing.  That was it.  The barbaric torture where they piled huge stones upon the victim's chest until they were crushed beneath them like worthless, helpless insects.  That's what it feels like.  The stones are piling on, and my air is getting thin._

     He sat forward, vaguely nauseated.  His mind was a blur of images and sensations.  The aftermath of Potter's collapse played in his mind, an ancient kinescope run amok.  The memories were stilted and warped, jerky and colored with an almost sensuous terror.  Potter going limp in his arms, lolling like a dead carp.  Ron Weasley's furious, accusatory stare.  The sepulchral silence of the classroom.  It had been so quiet that he thought he could hear the sound of dust motes settling on the floor.  Hermione Granger's wide, glassy eyes when she returned with Madam Pomfrey.  The bottomless, frighteningly unhinged gaze of Rebecca Stanhope.

     Bedlam had erupted with the arrival of Madam Pomfrey and the Headmaster.  Not from the students; they remained eerily quiet and still.  Time had frozen for them, and in the interminable seconds before Madam Pomfrey's incredulous shout, he had had occasion to think that it was entirely possible that the seams of time had torn, leaving an irreparable breach between the students and their bewildered teacher.  Perhaps they were mercifully unaware of the chaos around them.  Perhaps they were still in the first stupefying moments after Potter had quaffed that cursed draught.

     The thought had simultaneously comforted and horrified him.  If they could not see the pandemonium before them, then they could not see _him_.  He was still safe, his voluntary solitude was still intact.  Better yet, they could not see him stripped of his confidence and professorial authority.  They were ignorant of the fact that their sniping, unflappable Potions Master was reduced to a bumbling, undignified shell of nearly broken nerves.

     But if they were sheltered from these realities, then it also meant that they could not possibly have seen his genuine bewilderment, the throat-constricting numbness that had seized him when the boy wonder had wilted bonelessly against him.  They would see only fragments of unpleasant recollection, memories of the vicious professor they had always known.  When the inevitable inquiry came, they would superimpose the wrathful iconoclast image he had so eagerly constructed for himself over the true events of that terrible hour.  He would be undone by his own legend.

     _Twined your own noose, you have, Severus._

     He exhaled heavily through his nose.  Nothing new about _that_.  He had been guilty of it since earliest youth, starting on the day he had opened his first book on Dark magic.  He should have slammed it shut, shoved it aside like the damnable thing it was, but he hadn't.  The journey to Hell begins with a single step, and he had taken that step so thoughtlessly, as though it were just like all the others.  He had been so confident, so _certain_.  Much like Potter, come to think of it.  His lips curled in an unconscious grimace.

     The blistering agony of the Dark Mark being seared into his flesh knocked the arrogant naivete from him in a cold, brutal roundhouse slap, or at least it should have, but somehow his feet had continued down that black and treacherous path, treading heedlessly over the blood and bones of the souls in Voldemort's path.  Even then, even in the wake of overwhelming, staggering evidence, he had thought he could handle it.  While the two hands that lived on the ends of his arms had busied themselves with matters of conquest and torture and pleasures unparalleled, invisible hands, the ones that truly mattered, had been weaving deadly snares.  

     He had wrapped and entangled himself in those snares for three long years, never noticing as they tightened around him, strangling him, pulling him apart with insidious languor.  Until that terrible night so long ago when he'd awoken from corrupt, seductive dreams to find his shaking hands and stunned mouth covered in warm blood and the irrefutable evidence of his own savagery sprawled cold and sightless in front of him.  The scales of smug entitlement had fallen from his bulging eyes, and he had fled, running for the one place and the one man in whom he knew he could trust, the one man who had been faithfully trying to extricate him from the snares of his own making ever since.

     Something warm nudged his hands.  He looked up to see Dumbledore holding out a steaming cup of chamomile tea.  He was not smiling.  His blue eyes were heavy with concern, and his face seemed to sag in the bright light.

     "Have some tea, Severus," he said quietly.

     Snape took the tea without comment.  He didn't want it.  He was not even certain he could swallow, but he simply didn't have the strength to argue.  He held the handle of the delicate teacup between his fingers, barely aware of its simmering warmth.  He felt clumsy and awkward, and he was suddenly afraid that if he tried to take a token sip to appease the Headmaster, the cup would slither from his fingers and crash to the floor with a sound like broken dreams.  Just as the phial carrying his likely death had done.

     _Stanhope must feel this way at times, _he thought idly.  _At war with her own body._

     He bristled at the thought of sharing any physical empathy whatsoever with her.  It was unsettling, and besides, he had far more urgent things to do than ruminate upon her.  Why he was even thinking of her when he was about to be accused of the attempted murder of Harry Potter was beyond him.  He absently took a sip of tea, oblivious to the liquid heat as it scalded his tongue.  There would be blisters in the morning.

     He knew damn well why he was thinking of her, really.  No use hiding from the truth.  He was thinking of her because she had frightened him badly, almost as much as the sight of Potter lying unmoving and mottled at his side had.  She was so very odd, a twisted, watchful, leering sybil that spoke in riddles never solved.  The way she had looked at him just before the arrival of much needed help had jarred him, made him bite his tongue in chilled dismay.  For a moment before Pomfrey's confused face had blocked her from his vision, Stanhope's eyes, those sly, piercing, caressing searchlights, had been obscured by an impenetrable fog of abject terror.

     Her last frantic, mouthed words reformed in his mind.  _Get away.  Get away._

_     From what, Stanhope, from what?_

     He set the full cup and saucer on the desk and scrubbed his face in his palms.  He felt gritty and drained.  It would figure that his oracle would be cracked, distorted beyond comprehension.  She certainly wasn't normal.  She was cryptic, unnerving in her actions.  When Dumbledore had swept in, all red robes and controlled worry, Snape had expected her to quiet, but instead her agitation had only increased.  A mournful whimper had escaped her, and she had pressed her forearm to her lips in an effort to smother the sound.  Her huge, raw eyes had darted between the Headmaster and himself, and for the briefest moment, there had been the faint, prickling tension of an unspoken message hanging in the air.  Then it was gone, replaced by silent, breathless weeping.

     "How are you, Severus?"  The Headmaster's gentle voice cut into his reverie, full of concern and indefinable sadness.

     He opened his mouth to speak, but the most he could muster was a hopeless, irritated grunt.  There were no words to help him now.  He looked into that wise old face and gave a mirthless half-smile.

     "What happened?" Dumbledore asked quietly, setting his own tea aside and steepling his long, thin fingers beneath his chin.

     Snape slowly spread his hands and let them droop to his lap.  "I don't know Albus, I just don't know.  One minute, he was glowering at me with that intolerable disdain of his, and the next he was collapsing against me like a sack of wet grain."  He clenched his teeth against the memory of Potter's limp body sagging against him.

     "He didn't seem ill before he took the potion?"

     "No, he was fine.  As mulish as ever," he muttered wearily.

     There was a protracted silence, and Snape could sense Albus gathering his courage for the next question.  He knew very well what it was likely to be, and he steeled himself, the muscles of his neck and shoulders going rigid.  He took a deep breath and held it.

     "Severus," the Headmaster said slowly, threading the needle of his words carefully, "is there any possibility that an interaction of ingredients or unknowing contamination could have taken place?"

     Though it was precisely the question he had anticipated, the frankness of it squeezed his heart like a vise.  Albus, whose trust and respect he coveted more than anything else, was asking him if he'd made a mistake, casting suspicious light on his skills as a Potions Master.  It made no difference that he was simply doing what any conscientious headmaster would; that he even felt the slightest need to do so cut him to the core.  The inside of his chest was suddenly very hollow, as if his heart had suddenly disintegrated.  The suffocating pressure remained.  He gripped the arms of his chair and forced himself to breathe.

     "No.  The draught was kept in a locked warded, cabinet until it was used.  No one could have tampered with it.  There was a jar of corrupted belladonna in the cabinet, but I removed it and washed my hands thoroughly before touching Potter's phial.  I inspected it myself.  Albus, aside from Potter's atrocious Potions work, there was absolutely nothing wrong with what he took.  All it should have done was make him violently ill."

     There was another excruciating silence, and Snape had the sneaking suspicion that he was going to like the Headmaster's next question even less than the last.  His teeth began their infernal, ceaseless grinding, the enamel cracking like dried bones.  His fingers throttled the handrests of his chair.  The nascent gnaw of an oncoming migraine sunk its teeth into the base of his skull, and he knew that it was going to be very bad indeed.  By nightfall, the nausea would make his insides writhe, and he would be begging the Fates to burn out the moon and stars.  He concentrated on Dumbledore's face, pushing back the slowly coiling pain.

     "This is going to be a difficult question, but understand that I must ask it," the Headmaster said gravely, pushing his spectacles onto the bridge of his nose and fixing him with a mournful gaze.  "You've been spending a great deal of time with Miss Stanhope, often late into the night.  Given that, can you say with absolute certainty that nothing was overlooked, perhaps missed by weariness?"

     Snape stared, his face scoured of emotion.  His heart was thudding slowly and painfully in his chest, and bile rose in his throat.  When he spoke, his voice was dead and cold.  "You mean, Headmaster, have I, in my careless arrogance and unrelenting desire to crush the spirit of a cripple with a mind hard as diamonds, inadvertently killed Harry Potter?"

     The Headmaster's face softened.  "I don't doubt your ability as a Potions Master," he said soothingly.  "But I am well aware that everyone makes mistakes."

     "And I have made more than my share," he finished dourly.  "What's one more?"

     Dumbledore looked at him in surprise.  He opened his mouth to respond, but Snape stood and turned away, folding his arms across his chest.  He knew he sounded like a petulant schoolboy, but he couldn't stop himself.  He was raw and vulnerable, and he loathed the feeling.  He was not supposed to be laid bare before anyone, not even Albus.  He should be impervious to such intrusion.

     It was all that girl's doing.  His life had jumped its predestined course the moment she'd passed through these walls.  Damn her.  He'd known she would bring nothing but trouble.  No one had listened to him, of course.  Why should they?  He was only miserable, brooding Professor Snape, the soulless bastard who despised the world and everything in it.  He was bound to decry anything not to his liking.  Look what he'd done to Potter.

     _Stop it.  Stanhope has nothing to do with this.  You would have given Potter that potion whether she was here or not.  It's something you've hoped for since his first year.  She didn't put the idea into your head.  Nor is she responsible for your obsession with both her and Potter.  Those were works of your own creation.  Don't lay them at her ruined feet._

He wandered to the mammoth bookshelf that swallowed the left side of the Headmaster's office and ran his fingers along the smooth, leather spines of the countless books cradled there like contented old friends.  They were cool to the touch, and he suddenly slumped against them, resting his burning temple against a creased brown spine.  Merlin, he was exhausted.  His anger and fear had sapped the very marrow from his bones, and it was all he could do not to wilt to the floor like a dying orchid.

     "I have never botched a potion in seventeen years.  Not a single one."  He spoke softly, almost to himself.  "No matter what happened, I always got it right.  I've brewed a flawless Wolfsbane on my knees when lingering pain from Cruciatus made standing no more than a foolish lover's fancy.  I've vomited on the floor and kept right on working just so Remus Lupin, sworn enemy and filthy werewolf, could lead his mundane little life.  Do you really think I'd make such a catastrophic error on account of late-night detentions with a hopeless pupil?"  He studied the floor.

     "Oh, Severus."  Full of sorrow.

     Something in the way he said it made Snape look up sharply.  It reminded him of blasted Stanhope the day she'd burned his legs.  _Oh, sir._  The same bewildered despair, lost and beseeching.  Sure enough, Dumbledore's eyes were bright with horrible realization.  He cursed his vile tongue for lashing the only heart that had ever seen fit to find him worthy of patience.  He tucked his chin into his chest, as though withdrawing from a chill wind.

     Stanhope again.  She was beginning to permeate every facet of his life.  Here he was, standing before the Headmaster after watching the Boy Who Lived collapse into a lifeless heap, and he was thinking of her, of that twisted, goblin child.  She gave him no peace.  Before Potter had fallen, she was about to be responsible for yet another calamity.  That damned note.

     His hand drifted to the pocket of his robes, and he flinched when his fingertips grazed the dry parchment crumpled there.  The ugly words it contained surfaced in his mind, and he pulled his hand away, wiping it roughly against the coarse cotton of his robes.  It was like touching corpse flesh or rotten wormwood.

     _That's one point for Potter's collapse; it will knock McGonagall's fanciful imaginings of illicit encounters with underage students out of her mind._

     He snorted softly.  Wonderful.  Exonerated for one imagined crime while being lynched for another.  What bloody good fortune.  Not that it was much of a leap from groping hapless students to cold-blooded assassination of the entire wizarding world's only hope, especially with sadistic ex-Death Eater on one's resume.  If Potter died, so did he.  Not even Albus would be able to protect him from the resultant firestorm.

     What would it be like to die at the hands of a Dementor?  He supposed that would depend upon the manner in which they chose to execute him.  Life imprisonment in Azkaban and death by Dementor's Kiss were essentially the same thing.  One just took far longer than the other.

     The Dementor's Kiss.  The stuff of childhood nightmares.  The stuff of all nightmares.  It was quick, but none could say if it was painless.  No one had ever come back from the experience.  Once done, it could not be undone.  The devil could wrest a soul out, but it seemed only the Fates could put it in.  Barty Crouch, Jr. was the only victim of the Kiss he had seen, and hopefully the last.  He was profoundly grateful that he had only stumbled upon the aftermath.  Had he seen the actual kiss, he may well have quietly lost his mind.

     The Kiss was a terrible thing, a violation of the most intimate kind.  It was, at its heart, rape, the most brutal unforgivable rape of all.  Monstrous creatures drawn from the pages of some forgotten storybook of polluted fairytales-not the clean, glittering tales Muggles read to their children as they snuggled warm and safe beneath their quilts, not the hopeful stories where everything comes out right in the end, but the dirty, sordid tales of treachery, murder, and depravity, the tales of truth, in other words-put their dead, clammy mouth over yours and stole your breath, and with it your memories, your knowledge, your joy.  _You.  _They stole you, filling numb, thoughtless, irrelevant lungs with their fetid, carrion stink, leaving a rocking, dribbling husk behind.

     That was terrible, yes, no denying it, but there was a worse fate.  That bastard Fudge could very well gleefully decide to toss him into a dank and crumbling cell.  He would call it mercy, all the while knowing he'd damned him to a terrestrial hell.  He, Snape, would know, be agonizingly aware of the slow, diabolically erotic process of losing himself.  Piece by piece, they would take it all away with their greedy, scabrous hands, tearing the delicate threads that held him together.  He would reach for a memory, only to find it gone, replaced by a noisome recollection he longed to forget.  One by one, the wan lights of his fortress would flicker and die, plunging him into unbanishable darkness.  The reservoirs of his memory were deep, indeed.  It would take years to drain them, years before the flame of his cognizance guttered, smothered beneath a rotten wind of Dementor breath.

     _And you would last a very long time, wouldn't you, longer than even Black?  Not much happiness in you.  Though you know they would tear you apart looking for it.  How long, Severus?  Twenty years?  Thirty?  Seventy?  Four walls and your mind trickling through your fingers.  A fitting end for you._

     Fingers grazed his forearm.  He looked up, startled.  He had been so absorbed in his thoughts that had had not heard Dumbledore approach.  He met that serene blue gaze for a moment, then resumed his contemplation of the floor.

     A familiar bowl appeared beneath his nose.  "Sherbet lemon?"  The loathsome sweets twinkled up at him, gleaming with a sticky glaze of sugar.

     "No, Headmaster.  I regrettably must decline," he muttered, eyeing them without enthusiasm.  Eating was the last thing on his mind.  The thought of swallowing the gaggingly sweet confection made his stomach heave.

     "Alas, and I was convinced I'd won a convert," he sighed, sounding disappointed.  The bowl disappeared from view.  "Intriguing floor pattern, Severus?" he inquired placidly.

     That was Albus-speak for _look at me_, and so Snape raised his gaze, suddenly feeling as though he were the one weighted down by one hundred and fifty years of unwanted knowledge and experience.  He fought the urge to squirm beneath those discerning eyes.  He hadn't felt so unsettled before him since fifth-year when he'd been dragged into the office along with St. Potter, Sr. and his cronies after an incident involving a very public display of his rather shoddy undergarments.  Looking up at him then, he'd wanted to melt into the floor, his sallow cheeks burning with humiliation and shame.  That old feeling had returned, compounded by the belief that this time he deserved the venerable man's ridicule.

     A swamping sense of failure filled him, made him feel hollow, brittle, as if his bones had been leeched of their marrow.  He'd let Albus down, the one thing he'd sworn never to do, and he'd done it spectacularly.  Potter had fallen on his watch, _his_, seemingly poisoned by something left in his care.  He could have done no worse had he throttled the boy himself.  Albus and the running of Hogwarts would come under close scrutiny from an unfriendly Ministry, and it would be all his fault.  He'd made a disaster of things, and his latest, most grievous error in judgment was going to drag down the only man who had ever thought him worthy of a first chance, much less a second.  There was nothing else for it.

     "I suppose you'll be expecting my resignation," he said stiffly, the words causing his throbbing heart to freeze in his chest.

     Dumbledore, who had been looking at him with a peculiar, inexplicable expression of fondness, grew grave, his eyebrows furrowing.  "What on earth on you talking about, Severus?" he asked softly.

     "You know very well what I'm talking about," he snapped.  "The illustrious Harry Potter has collapsed in my classroom after testing something I gave him, something in my possession and my possession only since the day it was brewed.  It should never have happened.  The Ministry of Magic will be here as soon as word leaks, and I'm afraid neither of us has the most sparkling of records," he snarled bitterly.  "It would be better for all concerned if I left."

     Dumbledore stared at him, sucking contemplatively on one of his candies.  His face was inscrutable.  "Unless you are confessing to the attempted murder of Harry Potter, I refuse to accept your resignation," he said simply.

     "But Headmaster, I am a liability."

     "Only in your mind.  You are the finest Potions Master Hogwarts has ever had, and we cannot afford to lose you, not now.  You will teach them what they need to know.  No, Severus, I think you will be staying here."

     Dumbledore's words were a balm to his tortured soul, but he dared not express such sentiments.  Now was not the time for maudlin outbursts of hysterical emotion.  What was needed was reason.  He had to shake the Headmaster from this mawkish, disgustingly noble devotion, make him do what was best for himself and the school.  He was not worth the sacrifice.

     "Headmaster, I refuse to put the school at risk for the sake of misguided loyalty."

     "As do I."  Dumbledore's tone was calm, but there was a hint of steel behind the admonition.  The argument was over.

     "For the record, I do not believe you intentionally poisoned Harry.  No, I rather think you would have shown a bit more subtlety, more panache.  Poisoning is a tad déclassé, especially for such a skilled potion maker, don't you think?"  Dumbledore offered him a wan smile and returned to his chair.

     In spite of the dire calamity he was facing, Snape felt his lips twitch in a bemused smirk.  Albus always seemed to be able to cut to the heart of the matter, to find the tiniest kernel of levity amid the darkest, most tumescent clouds of strife and danger.  The oppressive weight under which he had been struggling for the mad hour since Pomfrey had whisked the comatose Potter to the Hospital Wing shifted; it did not depart entirely, and he doubted that it ever would, but at least he could draw breath without feeling as though he were heaving heavy stones with every rise and fall of his chest.  He sat down beside Dumbledore.

     "More tea?"  Dumbledore gestured to the silver tea set to his left.

     "No, thank you."

     A thoughtful silence, filled only by the sounds of indrawn breath, the liquid hiss of sand dribbling through the hourglass, and the dusty ruffling of Fawkes' feathers as he preened himself upon his perch.  Then, "Any idea as to what could have gone wrong?"

     Snape sighed, running ivory fingers through his lank black hair.  "I wish I knew, Headmaster.  That phial was in my locked, warded cabinet.  No one could have tampered with it."

     "And you have never left it unlocked and unattended?"  Dumbledore scratched the end of his nose.

     "Never," he answered vehemently.  "The ingredients inside are far too dangerous."

     Something niggled at the base of his brain just then, a tiny voice of doubt that whispered that he was wrong, that he _had_ left it unsupervised.  It was distant and mocking, and the more he reached for it, the further it retreated.  He racked his brain, searching desperately for a single moment of careless inattention.  Even thirty seconds would be enough time.  There was nothing.  

     Nor should there have been.  Any teacher worth his Galleons would have guarded that cabinet with their lives, and he had.  It was constantly in his field of vision, and his back was never to it for more than ten seconds.  No one should have been able to come within five feet of it without his knowledge, and even if they did, the ward tied to his lifeforce would alert him immediately.

     _Then how did Potter and his friends get their grubby hands on that boomslang skin in their second year?_

     Merlin if he knew.  The cabinet was unlocked at the beginning of class when appropriate and locked again at the end, and he watched it from the corner of his eye for the duration, on the lookout for skulking thieves and furtive miscreants.  Nary a shadow had ever approached it.  Unless they'd managed to abscond with it during the Dungbomb melee that year.  He snorted.  That wouldn't surprise him at all.  Potter was certainly clever enough for such a scheme.

     He thought back.  Had any similar incident taken place since he'd placed Potter's phial in the cabinet?  No.  The past few days had been as dull and tedious as ever, passing in a haze of futile remonstration and rampant point deduction.  Not that he considered the latter cause for concern; it was actually one of the few delights he allowed himself.  First-years in particular were a wellspring of idiocy, and they never failed to afford him ample opportunity to whittle precious grains of sand from the House hourglasses brooding in their niches in the entrance hall.

     "Any word on Potter?" he muttered, slowly rolling his neck to ease the cramping tension there.

     "No.  Minerva will bring word as soon as she can."

     He groaned.  Minerva was going to pillory him.  How could she not?  She had spent years accusing him of biding his time until he could bring down Potter, and now her dark and hectoring prophecies had been fulfilled.  Oh, yes, when that door swung open, the goddess of war for which she had been named would pass over the threshold, and she would enter, eyes ablaze and radiating righteous fury.  She would tower over him, pointing a gnarled, accusatory finger, and from her mouth would spew a lifetime's worth of bitter indictment.  And he would say nothing, because she would be incontestably right.

     What was worse, she would have a two-pronged attack.  Should she run out of recriminations about Potter, she could simply turn her hand to baseless but persistent insinuations regarding his nocturnal conduct with one Rebecca Stanhope.  That was yet another trap of his own making.  He should never have taken to spending so much time alone with her, even if it was spent in the laudable pursuit of academia.  People were bound to start thinking along the same lascivious lines as McGonagall.  But he had been so blind, so focused on the chase, the elusive trail of her unfathomable inner workings that he had forgotten the importance of paying at least nominal mind to propriety.  He had a feeling that such oversight would cost him dear before all was said and done.

     _We wouldn't be having these thoughts if this were any other student, especially any other _male_ student._

     No, likely not.  Had this been anyone else, no one would have batted an eyelash at the countless hours he passed in the company of a single student, especially not if the student happened to be a Gryffindor.  Such diligent punishment would have been blithely attributed to his celebrated hatred of the House of lions and left at that.  Stanhope, with her twisted legs and cunning, watchful face, was a beast unto her own.  She was _special._  Like Potter, she existed on a plane all her own, untouchable by ordinary rules.  He supposed that in McGonagall's view, he was not only a child-molesting fiend, but he was a _deviant_ child-molesting fiend.  Ever so much worse.  Stanhope, _Stanhope_, of all people.  Any man deriving satisfaction from accosting her pitiful frame must be a sick, sick man indeed, and who better than an ex-Death Eater to fit that bill?

     _I don't see why.  She's female._

_     Only when it suits McGonagall to see her as such.  Otherwise, she is nothing more than a neuter, semi-sentient piece of talking flesh._

_     So, she will be, for all intents and purposes, just female enough to hang me, but not quite female enough for me to justify my predations should I try._

_     Precisely._

_     Terribly convenient, that._

_     Such is the nature of the witch hunt._

     He shook himself.  What was he doing?  Harry Potter was lying in the Hospital Wing, dying for reasons unknown, and he sat here fretting over an accusation not yet lobbed.  The day's events must have undone him more than he was willing to admit.  

     _That letter won't stay quiet long; as soon as Potter comes around, she'll remember it.  It's her trump card._

     Well, be that as it may, it would do him no good to brood over stones not yet cast.  Better to concentrate on the ones hurtling toward the fragile bowl of his skull at this very moment.  _The_ stone, actually, the single, monstrous rock that could crush him to bloody dust beneath its unyielding weight.  The unforgettable and unshakeable millstone that bore the name of Potter, as had nearly all the wailing stones that he had ever borne.

     Still, he couldn't help but wonder if Albus knew about the letter.  Surely he must have if the meeting was to have been held in his office.  Before he could ask about that, however, the door opened, and McGonagall staggered inside.

     Snape was so shocked by her appearance that he recoiled in his chair; it was the antithesis of what he had expected.  She did not stride into the room, full of brimstone anger and holy surety, but rather she lurched inside, swaying on her feet, shoulders stooped and hunched beneath an invisible burden.  Her hair, usually kept in an immaculate bun, had escaped its bonds and straggled dispiritedly around her pallid face.  She tottered uncertainly across the room and collapsed into the nearest chair.

     Her face was the worst.  He had never seen it so void of life, so slack and haggard.  She had aged forty years in as many minutes, it seemed, and when she looked at them, the tendons of her neck creaking as she raised her head, her eyes were red-rimmed and raw, as though she had been weeping.  They were also, he saw, glazed and hollow, the eyes of a person who has seen the all the very worst fears of their life realized in a single instant.

     _He's dead,_ he thought dismally, a terrible, sinking dread settling into the pit of his stomach.  _Potter is dead, and Lord Voldemort's reign is assured.  And when that fact penetrates the thin cocoon of McGonagall shock, all of her rage and despair will be loosed upon my head._  He braced himself for the worst.

     But she said nothing.  She merely sat in her chair and blinked at them.  Occasionally, her mouth would twitch as she struggled to speak, a simple art that had temporarily abandoned her.  A grating sigh escaped her, but no more.  Her hands shook.  Dreamily, she fumbled in the pockets of her robes for her spectacles, unfolding them and putting them on with painful care.  She opened her mouth, then closed it again.

     "Well?" Snape demanded harshly, unable to bear the suspense any longer.

     She started, her eyes clearing of the worrying fog that had covered them like a thin scrim of winter frost.  She spared him a furious glance, the flesh around her lips pulling taut as anger suffused her face.  She opened her mouth to respond, but at the last second she turned away from him and looked at the Headmaster.  "Have you any tea, sir?" she asked faintly, taking great pains not to look at Snape.

     "Of course, Minerva," came the quiet answer, and from the relief in his voice, Snape knew that McGonagall's shocking appearance had troubled him as well.

     He was not surprised at her anger or her blatant rebuff.  He had, in fact, been anticipating both, and yet they still stung.  Some deep and unacknowledged part of him had been hoping that she would see to the truth of the matter, as Albus had done.  She was intelligent enough, perceptive enough to see that he would never be so stupid, so…_inane._  She knew him better than that.  She must.  She had, after all, been privy to the wrenching sacrifices of the last fifteen years.

     _She doesn't want to see.  It isn't convenient._

     The bitterness, ever present beneath his skin and in the wet hollows of his bones, arose once more, and he wrapped himself in it, insulating himself from the subtle currents of unspoken emotion that hung in the air.  Smothered in its cloying, soothing, familiar grasp, pain no longer touched him.  It was far away, insignificant.  It no longer mattered.

     Of course she would not see.  Obstinate, impenetrable blindness was a Gryffindor right, a fact young Potter had proven time and again, and as Head of that venerable House, it came as no great shock to him that she would be the grande dame of intractability.  She saw only what she wished, primarily the colors of his House scarf and the Head of House pin he wore proudly on the collar of his robes.  The glittering silver serpent was all she could see through the myopic, cataracted vision of her carefully nursed prejudice.  She was Gryffindor, he was Slytherin, and that difference alone was enough to assure her of his guilt.

     "Sugar?" Dumbledore asked, looking inquiringly over his spectacles at McGonagall, hand poised over the sugar bowl, spoon teetering between his fingers.

     "Yes, please."

     "One lump or two?"

     "Two," she said tersely, still avoiding Snape's gaze.

     They sat in painful silence while McGonagall sipped her tea, absently stirring it with her spoon.  Snape studied the floor and the endless rows of portraits that adorned the walls, eager for any distraction from her hard, haunted face and the damning looks she would undoubtedly be casting his way.

     Finally Dumbledore broke the uneasy, waiting silence.  "How is he, Minerva?"

     The teacup began to jitter in her hands, clinking with unseemly merriment against the saucer, and she rested it on her knees to steady it.

     "He's alive, though just," she said, her voice exhausted and strained.  "Madam Pomfrey says he's in a deep coma."

     Though his posture changed not at all and he maintained a countenance of bland, bored indifference, relief washed over him in a vertiginous wave.  He was still alive.  Miracles still existed.  Beside him, Dumbledore let out a long sigh and sagged in his chair.

     "Does she have any idea what's wrong with him?"  Dumbledore adjusted his spectacles on his face.

     "Not the slightest," said McGonagall wearily.  "She says it could take weeks to discover what was in that phial."

     "I already told you what was in it," Snape snapped.  "Advanced Sleeping Draught."

     McGonagall rounded on him.  "When last I checked, Advanced Sleeping Draught most certainly does not send the drinker into a near-fatal coma.  Obviously something else was in that phial," she snarled.

     "Obviously," he hissed, and lapsed into silence again.  The pulsing shafts of pain signaling a migraine returned, and he kneaded his temples.

     "Severus," she said diffidently, shifting in her chair to face him, "I'm not accusing you of poisoning Harry.  I suspect you have more intelligence than that, but you must admit, the circumstances are suspicious.  In a locked cabinet to which you alone have access.  And there is the matter of your marked disdain-,"

     "Oh, I know," Snape snarled.  "I hate the boy, so I must have attempted to kill him.  Why not?  I'm Slytherin.  Isn't that what my sort does?"  He knew he was being petulant, paranoid, and reactionary, but he was past caring.  He was tired and unsure, and neither state was conducive to a settled disposition.  He wanted to get away from here, from her condescending, incomplete absolution, and think, to sort through the facts until he found what he was missing.  

     McGonagall drew herself up, and to Snape she looked like a disgruntled pigeon.  "I said no such thing," she huffed.

     "You didn't have to," he said softly.  "Your correspondence of earlier removed all doubt as to the regard in which you hold me."

     McGonagall flushed and sputtered indignantly, and he saw with a vicious surge of satisfaction that Dumbledore was looking at her quizzically.

     _So, you didn't tell him, did you?  My, my._

     "Correspondence?"

     "Well, yes, Headmaster.  You see-,"

     "It seems Professor McGonagall suspects me of lewd conduct with Miss Stanhope," he purred with savage glee.

     An ugly flush rose in her cheeks.  "I…I most _certainly _did not!  I simply wanted to be sure-,"

     Dumbledore held up a silencing hand.  "While I am most intrigued about this letter, I'm afraid it will have to wait until the mysterious illness of Harry's can be resolved.  Unfortunately, we cannot keep this quiet.  There were simply too many witnesses.  As such, I expect the first owls about the matter should arrive in London within five days.  The Ministry will waste no time once alerted to the situation.  At best, that gives us six days to solve the problem on our own.  After that, it will be out of my hands.  Let us make the most of it."

     McGonagall and Snape kept silent, awaiting instructions.

     "Minerva, tell Madam Pomfrey to analyze every shard of that broken phial for any substance that should not have been there.  Severus, you will provide Pomfrey with the list of ingredients for Advanced Sleeping Draught.  I also think it advisable that you inventory your stores for any discrepancy in your meticulous records."

     Snape nodded curtly.  He would have done those things without the Headmaster's orders.  They simply made sense.

     "What will you do, Headmaster?" asked McGonagall, rising from her chair.

     "I will be informing our network of the situation.  They will need to know."

     _Of course they will.  When the king falls, the court scrambles to fill the void, _Snape thought.

     McGonagall left without a word, and as Snape reached the door, Dumbledore called to him.

     "Severus?"

     "Yes, Headmaster?"

     "For the time being, I must ask you to suspend potion testing.  We can take no risks."

     "Yes, Headmaster," he said tonelessly, winding the bitterness around him more tightly still.  Anything to deflect the sting of unearned mistrust.

     He left and headed to the merciful solitude of the Potions classroom, mentally composing the ingredients list for Advanced Sleeping Draught.  Six days.  Not enough time, not nearly enough.  He stalked down the deserted staircase, heels of his boots snapping defiantly at the stone beneath them, and as he moved, the walls seemed to close in behind him.


	22. Watchers and Mirrors

To Jesus, because I loved you.  I still do.

Chapter Twenty-Two

     Draco Malfoy sat in the Slytherin Common Room in a state of delirious happiness.  Nor was he the only one.  Slytherin House was beside itself.  The normally silent room was abuzz with the low murmur of excited conversation.  By the fire, Parkinson was twittering madly to a seventh-year girl with an unfortunate mask of purple acne.  He kept his gaze down so that she would not mistake his observation for flirtation.  He hadn't felt this good in ages, and he didn't want to ruin it by fending off her latest romantic charge.

     Even Goyle was enjoying himself.  He was hunkered on the sofa beside Millicent Bulstrode, trying, he supposed, to flirt.  He had a peculiar, vacant expression on his face that Draco had last seen on a poleaxed house elf.  Then again, perhaps he was reading too much into it.  It could just be Goyle's more customary stupefied glaze distorted by the flickering firelight.

     If it were truly love he was looking for, he was to be sorely disappointed.  For years now, Bulstrode had been groomed for Vincent Crabbe.  That was the way things worked in the wealthy Death Eater families.  Marriages were arranged based on suitability and station; love had very little to do with it.  It was too unreliable, left too much to chance.  Goyle should have known better, but things often took a great deal of time to sink in with him.

     _You don't particularly relish the idea of yoking yourself to Pansy Parkinson._

     Of course he didn't.  No one in their right mind _would._  It would be akin to tethering a fine thoroughbred to a seedy cow.  It simply wouldn't work.  She was stupid, ugly, and unbecomingly soft in all the wrong places.  Her breasts were bulbous, lacking in the alluring feminine curves he found so appealing.  Her face was an exercise in architectural myopia, squashed, misaligned, as though a careless hand had brushed it from the cosmic workbench before the corporeal sculpting clay had set.  She was everything he was not, and she would never complement him as she ought.

     Why his father couldn't see that, he had no idea.  The man never missed a trick anywhere else.  Yet he insisted on the eventual union with distressing vehemence.  It was a mantra at the family table, and he mentioned it in every tedious letter.  Draco often wondered if he were privy to inside information about the Parkinsons.  As far as he could tell, they had nothing to offer his family.  The Malfoy family was attached to a great deal of money, most of it inherited from previous generations.  It was also very old, traceable for a thousand years at least.  It was the standard by which every other wealthy family judged itself.  If his mother bought a gown, the other wives of the inner circle would have the same in three days' time.  They had nothing to prove.

 The Parkinsons, on the other hand, were little more than pitiful hangers-on.  They were a Pureblood family of long standing, it was true, but they were new money.  Pansy's grandfather, an eccentric old coot by all accounts, had gained handsomely by speculating in the wizarding bond market.  There were also tantalizing rumors that he had also been involved in the illegal import and export of sundry contraband, including dragons, trolls, and half-breed giants.  No one could ever prove the allegations, of course, and in any case, however he came by it, the fact remained that the old codger somehow ended up with an obscene amount of money.  Nothing to touch the Malfoy fortune, but enough.  The old man had snuffed it a few years before he and Pansy started at Hogwarts, and since then, her family had been reveling in their newfound riches.

     They may have garnered wealth beyond the telling, but unfortunately they had inherited none of the poise and aplomb dealt to the historically monied families in spades.  They were boorish.  Madam Parkinson often surreptitiously picked the spinach aspic from her teeth with her long, exquisitely manicured nail when she thought no one was looking, and Mr. Parkinson laughed far too loudly at his father's drawing room humor.  They were greedy, unapologetic social climbers, and he suspected that, if it came to it, they would all too happily plunge the silver dagger into his father's back.

     _They're proper Slytherins, then; give them that much._

     Even if those things were not so, he still had not the remotest inclination to seduce Pansy because, well, she was _Pansy._  If familiarity bred contempt, then he knew no one better.  He had once seen her foraging in her left nostril for bogeys, and that image had remained with him ever after.  She had been little older than six at the time, but that was irrelevant.  It had colored his perception of her for good and all and quashed any romantic notions he may ever have entertained.  Thinking of her stirred no passion, only a cold revulsion.

     Ugly, simpering, pug-faced Pansy.  It wasn't fair.  He was entitled to better.  His name said so.  That he should be deprived of it on his father's unreasoning whim incensed him.  He didn't want her.  He wanted a gorgeous nymph he could drape on his arm like a living trophy, much as his father had.  Someone seductive, with beauty to rival the goddesses secreted on the misty peaks of Mount Olympus.  Intelligence and love were of no consequence.  His mother was possessed of neither, and she had never fallen to harm for their lack.  Indeed she seemed quite content with the false adoration and prestige his father's name awarded her.  As for father, that which he could not get from his mother, he found in the arms of his mistress, a well-bred Pureblood tart he housed in an opulent flat in London.  As far as he could see, a man could live very well without love, as long as he had his money and a beautiful woman.

     Ah, what did it matter now?  Marriage was still a lifetime away; there was plenty of time to wriggle out of the arrangement, and he was sure that if anyone could do it, he could.  He had been manipulating his parents for years, though his father was far more difficult to shift than his mother, and if it came to it, he could always poison Pansy or shove her off the staircase in the entrance hall.  Problems like that could be dealt with.  Besides, Slytherin was celebrating tonight.

     Potter had at long last toppled from his ivory pedestal, felled by a poison arrow.  He smirked at his sparkling wit.  How delicious it had been to watch him wilt against Professor Snape like a shorn and dying rose, the life and spark draining from his face with an almost heartbreaking languor, those fierce green eyes glazing with the stunned realization that his name was perhaps not synonymous with immortality, after all.  When he had folded to the floor in a graceless, unmoving heap, lifeless as brittle driftwood, the Slytherin side of the room had seethed and rippled with exultant incredulity.  Very discreetly, naturally.  It wouldn't do to tip your hand before the enemy.  Stoic faces, gleeful hearts.

     No one dared believe it, especially not the Gryffindors, who had sat rigidly in their seats, as though their half of the room had been struck by an Immobility Charm.  Quite comical, really, all those bulging eyes and slack lips.  In the blink of an eye, they had been rendered mental defectives.  Hermione Granger in particular had been a sight to behold, rocking mindlessly in her seat, hands digging into the shocked white flesh of her face.  The way she'd been carrying on, one would've thought she and Potter had something going.

     _Maybe they do; no accounting for his tastes.  His friendship with the Weasleys proves that._

     Righteous, do-gooding Potter.  No surprise that he'd cast his lot with that merry band of fire-headed fools.  Father had told him all about the older Potters, James and his precious Lily.  Smug, self-assured, certain of their moral rectitude.  Just like Harry.  Father had once snidely referred to them as Knights of the Order of Right, a bit of nomenclature that had made Draco want to cackle wildly, but he hadn't dared because Father had been positively venomous.  From what Draco had seen, insufferable posturing was as inheritable as genetic superiority.

     He looked around the Common Room at his fellow Slytherins as they chattered amongst themselves, and smiled.  For the first time since his arrival at Hogwarts, the House was proud of its heritage.  He saw it in every face, the sly, pleased glow that made them seem taller somehow, more substantial.  There was no skulking tonight, no drooping shoulders.  Everyone moved confidently, with the air of people who had thrown off long infirmity and embraced the bloom of health.  They walked with chests jutting so that the Slytherin House crest could be plainly seen.  A long-standing pall had been lifted.

     He was glad to see it.  For too long, they had been forced to wear their House affiliation like a mark of shame.  They were the dirt dwellers and dregs, unfit for any other House-too stupid for Ravenclaw, too resourceful for Hufflepuff, and too damn self-minded for Gryffindor.  The other Houses and the wizarding world in general looked down their long, bland, sanctimonious noses at them, consigning them to the realm of the irredeemable and untrustworthy simply by virtue of the silver serpents embroidered on their robes.

     That was fine by him.  Redemption was an asinine concept as far as he was concerned, though you would never know it by the way most of the professors prattled on about it whenever a Slytherin had an open ear.  They were always going on about making the right choices, choosing the right paths.  That ancient crackpot Dumbledore had made reference to it in his end-of term speech last year, admonishing them all to "remember Cedric Diggory."  What a load of rubbish.  Cedric had done nothing worthy of remembrance.  He was no more than a stupid Hufflepuff who had simply gotten in the way.  That homage should be paid to his idiocy was a notion only a sentimental, addled old Gryffindor could possibly endorse.

     Frankly, he wasn't sure what need he had for redemption.  From what did he need saving?  Clear thinking?  A desire for a future free of the human filth that currently infested the streets in an endless, streaming tide?  The innate instinct to save yourself at all costs?  He was quite comfortable with who he was; he had absolutely no desire to be molded into a prefabricated vision of what the bovine majority considered acceptable.  He was Slytherin.  It was as much a part of him, of his blood, as the mysterious gene that had given him the trademark platinum hair, and he would not be ashamed of it.

     The peons didn't understand, of course, and they never would.  To them, Slytherin was a bad place, a place to which no one in their right mind would want to be sentenced.  It was purgatory, if not Hell itself.  He supposed it had never occurred to them that those who lived their lives beneath the shadow of the serpent had chosen it of their own free will.  They had elected their path just as the Hufflepuffs, Ravenclaws, and Gryffindors had, and they had done it gladly.  Their choice had not been made by their bloodlines, as most people thought and indeed hoped, but by the silent volition of their hearts.  They had _willed_ themselves into Slytherin.  Nothing more and nothing less.  They could have just as easily traveled another, safer road, but that was not what they desired, and the Sorting Hat, for all its tattered and frayed threads, had known it all too well.

     Tonight the most denigrated and underestimated House had struck back, and knowing this spread a glorious warmth through his body.  He rested his head on the back of the sofa and closed his eyes, relishing the peaceful feeling in his soul.  They had done something, finally done something instead of waiting for events to unfold.  That was how it should be.  It was high time they seized the reins of fortune.  The fact that Potter was the one to bear the brunt of their unexpected leap to action was merely a bonus.

     Speaking of which, where was Professor Snape?  Draco had expected him to be here, but he wasn't.  He should be here celebrating with the rest of them.  He had, after all, been the one to bring about this momentous occasion.  Not that he was known for his displays of emotion.  Indeed, Professor Snape was the most stoic man he had ever encountered.  Aside from a frequent smirk, his face seemed wholly incapable of demonstrating feelings.  Even his father was prone to outbursts to anger or frustration, but Professor Snape was cold, cold as tundra permafrost, and Draco admired him for it.

     He wondered where he'd gotten to.  Normally, he would have stalked here just after class and remained until dinner, marking parchment in his cramped, dingy office and snarling at anyone who disturbed his solitude.  But the Common Room portrait hole remained closed.  He was probably in Dumbledore's office trying to explain what happened.  

     _What an interesting story that promises to be.  There aren't that many ways to interpret what happened.  It's the quintessential locked room mystery.  The Potions Master administering poison from a locked storage cabinet, a cabinet only he can open.  Not much to explain there._

     And yet, somehow, he was sure Professor Snape _would _explain it satisfactorily, to Dumbledore at least.  He must have woven some mightily impressive tales in the past to retain his position; some of the things he had done were not strictly pursuant to Hogwarts' disciplinary guidelines.  He was positively certain that forcing ugly Rebecca Stanhope to clean up her own piss wasn't exactly a sanctioned punishment, but he had done it all the same.  No, Professor Snape would have no trouble with that fool Dumbledore.  The Ministry, however, was another matter.

     Though it was rife with secret Death Eater spies, and therefore well represented by the Slytherin contingent, officially Slytherins were persona non grata.  They held no posts of any significance; the only known Slytherin to be employed by the Ministry was an enfeebled old man whose sole job was to sort the incoming and outgoing mail.  Apparently, for all its braying that Death Eaters were bogeys from the past that had vanished along with their vanquished Dark Lord, they were taking no chances.  The fact that a Slytherin with purported Death Eater ties had brought down Harry Potter was bound to attract notice.  

     There would be an inquiry.  Even if imbecilic Fudge wanted to keep things quiet, word would get out soon enough, and when it did, the hue and cry would be immediate.  The outraged public would demand an investigation, and Minister Fudge, eager to curry favor, would certainly oblige them. 

     Ministry inquiries were nasty affairs, according to Mother.  Father had been the subject of one not long after his birth.  After the unforeseen fall of Lord Voldemort, they had rounded up all avowed Death Eaters for trial.  One by one, they were tried, with mixed results.  Some, like the Lestranges, had been loyal to the end, but others, like Father, had been smart enough to follow the more profitable course.  Thanks to the clever Imperius Curse defense, he had been acquitted of all charges, but the stigma of suspicion had remained.

     Not that it bothered Father much.  He had never given much thought to the opinions of those beneath him, which meant that he cared for no opinion but his own.  Life went on just as it had before the trial.  Forgiveness came easily as long as you could be useful, especially in the financial sector.  Monetary donations were a more than satisfactory penance for those whose sins could never be proven.

     Unfortunately for Professor Snape, things would not be so simple.  He was monied but badly connected, having never mastered the subtle art of persuasive association.  He wasn't adept at ubiquitous flattery; his tongue was crafted for dissection, a slicing silver scalpel, not a soothing trowel.  Sarcasm and dark wit were his tools, and they would hardly avail him now.  He was alone, trapped by a choice made long ago.

     There was no family to help him, either.  When Father was under investigation, Mother was manning the front, hiring the best solicitors and haranguing the Ministry on an hourly basis to be sure that he was well-maintained.  She brought him books and fresh robes.  If Professor Snape were detained, he would have no ally to keep vigil over him, no strident voice braying in the Ministry corridors about mistreatment and impingement of basic human decency.  He would sit, day after day, hour after miserable hour, in the same dank, fetid holding cell in Azkaban wearing the same drab, filthy robes.  No books, no visitors, just the monotonous drip of the faucet and the silent passage of time until a smug Auror arrived to escort him to his preordained judgment.  Nor would there be anyone to weep for him when the sentence was read.  Oblivion would come for him with no fanfare, and in time, days perhaps, his name and face would be forgotten.

     Well, not entirely.  The Death Eaters would remember him.  He would be the first martyr of the second coming.  The Dark Lord would hold his name on high, venerate it along with the Lestranges.  If Potter died, his name would have no equal.  Future Death Eaters would inscribe it alongside the names of their ancestors in the family Bible.  Children would hear of his greatness, his sacrifice to the cause.  The name Severus, rare now, would have a resurgence; it would, for a time, serve as a marker of fraternity.

     It did not surprise him that Professor Snape would assume the role of martyr.  He was well-suited for it, one could almost say destined.  His stoicism would serve him well in the long, lightless years ahead when the voracious maw of Azkaban swallowed him whole and he was ground to pieces in the belly of the beast.  In an odd way, the same isolation that would damn him now might very well save him later.

     He had always admired Professor Snape, and after tonight he revered him.  No one else would have dared, had such audacity.  It was incredible.  All the planning, all the covert plotting, all the murmured meetings in Father's drawing room, and Professor Snape had trumped them all under the very nose of Potter's highly touted guardians.  Using the most obvious method at his disposal, no less.  It was brilliant, worthy of a Death Eater, and it made his father's cautious, reserved machinations look absolutely ridiculous.

     _He must have a set of solid brass, _he mused, stroking the fingers of the left hand with the fingers of his right.

     Where _was _he?  Even if he were being roasted over coals in Dumbledore's office, he should have been back by now, if for no other reason than to spew his venom at the more giddy revelers.  He supposed it was possible that the Headmaster had already summoned the Aurors to take him away, but he thought that unlikely given his penchant for keeping the more unsavory incidents at Hogwarts quiet.  Professor Snape's absence disturbed him.  The man was a creature of habit, and only something truly catastrophic could have kept him from his nightly sojourn in his office.

     _Maybe he's venting his considerable frustrations on that wretched Stanhope creature.  That always brings him joy._

Draco relaxed.  That would certainly explain things, and Rebecca Stanhope certainly qualified as a catastrophe.  Professor Snape was obsessed with her, had been since the beginning of term.  Everyone saw it.  There was something between them, something mysterious and untouchable.  Lessons were a silent battlefield now, one with no clear battle lines.  The weapons could not be seen, but they could be felt, whickering through the heavy, stale air with ferocious precision, striking at exposed wit and careless inattention with backbreaking force.  There had been no casualties yet, but that was only a matter of time.

     The eventual outcome of the battle was hardly in doubt.  Professor Snape would crush her beneath his heel when he tired of the game.  He was too cunning, too quick to be deterred by her feeble resistance, though Draco had to admit that she had lasted far longer than he thought she would.  It was like watching a mortally wounded gazelle struggling against a healthy, hungry lion.  There was no real contest, and deep within its lacerated, bleeding belly, the gazelle knew this, yet it fought all the same, lashing out frantically with its delicate, dying legs, clinging to the ebbing fragments of its life because that was what its instinct demanded of it.  But instinct was not enough.  Power was the only thing that could save it, could save Stanhope, and she simply was not strong enough to resist the iron jaws of Professor Snape.

     If he was secreted away in the Potions classroom with his favorite twisted little nemesis, then he would not return until far past midnight, and it was pointless to wait for him.  There was nothing to hold him here, and besides, he wanted to send a letter to Father detailing everything.  He most certainly would want to know, and maybe he could buy Professor Snape a bit of precious time by causing confusion at the Ministry.  He had always respected his ruthlessness.  

     He rose from the couch and headed up the stairs to the fifth-year boys' dormitory, narrowly avoiding a revolting and poorly executed come-hither glance from Pansy.  He moved with purpose, his back straight and his gait graceful and quick.  He wanted to get the owl off as quickly as possible.  For all his self-assured musing, he had the distinct feeling that Professor Snape was going to need all the help he could get.

     Back in the Gryffindor Common Room, Rebecca very closely resembled the terrified gazelle that Draco Malfoy thought her to be.  She sat in the darkest corner furthest from the fire and watched the rest of her House through wary eyes.  It was cold, but that was fine.  It meant that they would stay away, and that was exactly what she wanted.  There was safety in isolation, safety and space to think, and she craved both.

     The Common Room was quiet, resembling a psychological trauma ward.  Wax figures that blinked and moved and occasionally spoke sat stiffly on couches or in chairs, staring blindly into the fire and fiddling absently with locks of hair or frayed bits of cloth.  The few who were moving about did so slowly, jerkily, as though their joints, barely twelve years in service in some cases, had suddenly grown old and stiff.  Dennis Creevey sat awkwardly in a chair, back ramrod straight and gangly knees pressed tightly together.  His hands were clutching his knees so tightly that he had driven all the blood from his fingertips.  His eyes, like all the rest, were dazed and unblinking.

     His posture reminded her of an illustration she had once seen in a book on Victorian etiquette for young women.  She could remember nothing else about the book, not even the title, but that picture had stayed with her.  The young woman, a flawless specimen of feminine propriety, had sat much the same way, smiling sweetly amid a group of gentlemen gathered in a drawing room.  She was, as all proper ladies should be, protecting her decency.

     The idea of Creevey safeguarding his decency made her want to laugh, but she was afraid that if she started, she wouldn't be able to stop, and then she might start screaming, and if that happened, she would never stop.  She would scream and scream until they took her to St. Mungo's and left her there to rock and howl and cower from the images whirling in her brain.

     So she stayed silent, hiding, eyes darting restlessly around the room.  Silence and invisibility were her enemies and her allies, and at a time like this, she was grateful for them.  If she could have, she would have retreated still more, but behind her was unyielding stone.  She tucked her head and rounded her shoulders and lowered her eyelids until they were nearly closed.  She wanted to be _away._  She thought of retreating to the dormitory, but facing Winky's inquisitive eyes seemed worse than facing her Housemates.  Winky knew her better than they did, and she would ask questions, worry, and try to drag her to the Hospital Wing for inspection.

     _She hasn't got a nostrum in her storage cabinet that can fix this.  I don't think Professor Snape does, either.  No one does.  It's a job for Freud.  It could take him years to figure out.  Maybe he never would._

_     You don't need him to figure it out.  You never did.  Besides, since when have you trusted the opinion of those overpaid mental plumbers?  Seventy-five bucks per half hour to theorize that the reason you hate cabbage is because it smells and tastes like your old man's beer farts._  _You know why you saw what you did.  You just don't like the old memories it dredges up from the bottom of Recollection Lake.  You though you buried them deep enough, but you didn't.  I'm not sure you could have, if anyone could have._

     She shuddered, biting back the slimy, bitter taste of unwanted memory.  Grandpa was right about that, as he usually was.  She understood all too well what she had seen, and it made her feel sick and unclean.  She shivered as an icy draft found a chink in the tower wall and danced lightly over her skin, puckering it into gooseflesh.  Everything seemed hypersensitive, the delicate wind scouring her flesh like sandpaper.  Her nerves felt bruised and shocked, and no matter how hard she tried, she could not pull away from the abrasive, smothering clutch of her robes.

     A light, tickling touch, fingertip skittering across the gossamer blonde hairs of her right forearm.  Just enough sensory input to keep her from succumbing to the numbing insistence of her subconscious that she withdraw into her memories.  It would only shield her for so long.  When late evening fell and exhausted sleep overtook her, there would be no defense, nothing to prop up the barriers of her fortress.  The memories would come to her then with the surreal vividness only dreams could achieve.  She would have no choice but to face them.

     _Will I wake up screaming?_ she thought with woozy detachment.  _Will I wake up bathed in sweat and thrash in the pitch darkness like an ensnared animal?  And if I do will the howls be loud enough to bring McGonagall running and my dorm mates scrambling from their beads in bleary-eyed, tousle-haired disbelief?  _She suspected she might.

     Memories brought with them night terrors beyond the telling.  They had since she was a small child curled in her bed and listening to the muffled sounds of her parents fighting.  The night carried with it a darkness apart from and deeper than the absence of light.  It held in its secretive bosom sinister truths not seen by the deceptive light of day.  The ancient ones had been right in thinking that the barriers were thinner after the sun slipped from the sky and the world tumbled senselessly into the land of dreams, but they were misguided as to which were left unheeded.  It was not the veil between the living and the dead that was frayed and weak, but the unseen gulf between carefully constructed logic and truer dream.

     Maybe that was why people so often forgot their dreams.  Logic was quick to reassert itself with the coming of the light, to shore up the barricades that had been so easily thrown down, to replace the polished template of acceptability that had been knocked askew in the course of the mind's wanderings.  Except that her dreaming truths no longer seemed to be adhering to that neat little arrangement.  They were slipping from their nocturnal confinements too easily, roaming the dayscape, and they hadn't done that in a very long time.

     Exactly why the membrane between the land of shadows and the land of waking illusion had ruptured, she could not say.  Stress, maybe.  As much as she enjoyed the mental chess with Professor Snape, she could not deny that it was grueling, far more so than she would ever admit.  Her mind, usually the last thing to tire, felt stretched, loose, as though it had been ransacked.  Her thoughts, ever ordered and linear, living models of detached, often unassailable logic, tottered and veered along newly discovered paths, paths that twisted and contorted far from the known thoroughfares.

     They had gone down unknown paths before, in the fevered months before her friend sank beneath the relentless waves of his disease.  But such wanderings had been expected then.  People were supposed to go a bit crazy when their best friend wasted to nothing before their very eyes and left nothing behind but a desiccated husk and a few brown hairs trapped between the mattress of their deathbed.  So when the screaming started, no one was terribly concerned.  They just prescribed sleeping pills strong enough to render an ox comatose and jotted it down in her file.  Nor did they worry when Dinks spent half the night deciphering her terrified ramblings about the things that came for you in the night.  _It will pass, _they said, and eventually, it had.

     Now, the wanderings had begun again, and they were no longer confined to the tranquil watches of the night.  Her febrile mind and its innermost demons walked in the light, unheeding of the hour and the circumstance.  Perhaps they had grown weary of their long segregation and wished to see what lay beyond their twilit borders.  They were definitely stronger, and that made her afraid.

     _It's not just them.  It's you.  You're getting lax.  A consequence of letting down your guard.  You've put all your energy into dueling with Professor Snape, and there's nothing left to keep them out.  It's this place, too.  There is old magic within these walls, magic so old it has no name.  The Founders may not even have known it was there.  Some magic just _is_, like the ancient energy that surges through Stonehenge or the brief tingle you get when you brush your fingers against a dawn-dewed leaf.  It's in every stone in this castle, embedded in the foundations.  You feel it every time you breathe._

     That was true.  She did feel it.  It ran through her like a low-grade electrical current, made her teeth vibrate they way they sometimes did when she passed too closely by a power line.  The blood seemed run more quickly and freely through her veins.  Her feet, an ugly, mottled blue since she could recall-her grandfather had called them Smurf Feet-were a pale but undeniable pink.  Things flourished here.  Plants were greener and healthier.  On Halloween, she had seen Hagrid carrying a pumpkin as large as a wheelbarrow towards the kitchens.  The Earth knew it, too.

     _But if I feel it, everyone else has to._  She looked at her Housemates, careful no to establish eye contact, initiate conversation.  They all sat in silent reveries of their own, occasionally in pairs but mostly alone.  They were quiet, and their hollow eyes bespoke terrible loss, but none of them were cowering upon the sofa, pulling in on themselves to ward off unseen blows.  No one sobbed and gibbered on their knees.  No panic, no blind terror, just a taut, thrumming uncertainly that weighed them all down and held them in place, miniature figures in an exquisitely crafted tableau.

     _I'm insane.  That's the only explanation.  The stress of the transfer has proven too much, and my mind has gone on permanent vacation.  I just need a nice long rest in St. Mungo's, that's all.  No one else can see what I see._

_     Of course they can't.  No one else has lived what you've lived, and what you saw when young Potter keeled over goes back a very long way.  This isn't the first time.  You recognize it for what it is.  And maybe the energy here is feeding your perception just as much as your blood._

_     I don't want to think about that._

_     You don't have a choice._

An image shutterclicked through her mind, one that made her squeeze her eyes shut and grip the armrests of her chair.  A shocked, white face, stiff as cold marble, and beneath that something writhing and stretching, shifting until colorless, slack lips pulled into a predatory, lupine grimace.  She pushed it away, but another one came, this one of horrified green eyes spiraling to unseeing, burnt-ash black.  

     _Losing your mind.  Absolutely going bonkers.  You did not see that.  Did not._

_     All right, let's say you didn't.  Let's say it was a figment of your formidable imagination.  What difference does that make?  Your imagination has always been a damn good representation of your intuition, and your intuition knows very well what was happening in that room.  You know what's coming._

The finger on her forearm was racing, swathing a red mark across her skin.  Her mouth had gone dry.  She knew what he meant; no denying it.  The lynch mob was coming.  She had seen the first ghostly traces of it in the faces of her classmates, the burgeoning, feral bloodlust glinting in their eyes like private mania.  When the initial numbness wore off and the raw wound of seeing their savior collapse began to heal, the mob would gather, clutching their blood-slick stones and savage pikes and crying for atonement as red and rich as mulled wine.

     _The blood is in the water now, and they smell it.  He slipped and cut his foot on the jagged rock and he'll pay dearly for it.  They'll give him no quarter._

     She snorted wearily.  Professor Snape was just intractable enough not to ask for it, either.  Stiff-lipped and stiff-necked, that was him.  He would hang without a word, patiently strangle on his silence.  He would simply watch the proceedings from behind disinterested onyx eyes, and when the judgment was passed, he would not shy away from it.  He would rise from his seat without a murmur and go to his death with nary a whimper.

     _Part of him wants to let go.  Part of him welcomes the burden of damnation.  It's one weight, one stone too many, you see, and if it is foisted upon his shoulders, he can at last falter and stumble, fall into the cooling muck, never to rise again.  He is tired, so very tired, and if they damn him, rest will finally be within his grasp._

He knew about the waiting mob.  He was too astute not to.  Kneeling beside Potter, his pale face expressionless but his black eyes burning with the deepest confusion, he had looked into the collective face of his pupils and seen his doom there.  Then for the briefest of moments, she had seen anger there, fresh anger, not festering, stale, aimless rage.  He had been furious at them, enraged at their doubt, and seeing it there had given her hope, but then it had guttered, leaving only the old, familiar despair.

     _He knows he can't beat them, can't convince them that he didn't do it.  He's smart enough to see they'll never believe him, not after everything he's done, and you can bet your boots he's done a far sight more than you'll ever see.  He's not clinging to any false hope._

_     In other words, he will not fight them._

_     Not likely._

The hand rubbing her forearm snapped closed.  She was so damn tired, and none of this made sense.  Her dinner, a kidney pie which she had barely touched, sat heavily in her stomach.  Why couldn't she think this through, dissect it, break it down into its component parts?  There was no pattern, no rhyme or reason.  She needed sleep, but she knew that if she went to bed now she would only lie awake, tossing, turning, and sorting through the discordant images in her head with clumsy fingers.  Not to mention that eventually Filch would come calling to escort her to detention.

     _Filch isn't coming tonight.  Maybe not tomorrow or the day after that, either.  Professor Snape is in very deep trouble, and dealing with you is no longer his number one priority._

     That made sense, but at the same time, it failed to fit the professor she knew.  She was not stupid enough to believe that she was anything more than an interesting diversion for him, but she was a diversion he liked, and Professor Snape was a creature of habit.  Once he grew accustomed to something, he did not give it up lightly.  She had a feeling that if there were any way for him to continue their nightly sparring sessions, then he would.  

     She found the thought heartening.  Detentions with him had become woven into the fabric of her life, as much a part of it as dinner or her pre-bedtime bath, and she had grown to need the surety of their presence.  If they were gone, if _he _were suddenly absent from her nocturnal landscape, it would shake her fledgling sense of security to the core.  As long as he was here, things would be all right.  He had become her barometer of the status quo.

     _What will you do if he succumbs?_  

     She recoiled from the thought.  That was simply inconceivable.  He had to fight.  How could someone with such an imposing, confident demeanor just go quietly?  Surely he was of sterner stuff than that.  Even if some cowardly part of him longed to surrender to the crushing inevitability of the conviction that would come when he was tried, everyone was imbued with an instinctive drive for survival, to be left standing when the dust cleared.  If he gave in, then he would not quit life on his terms, and the desire to do just that, the knowledge that such a power was well within his grasp was what made those black eyes glow with such irrefutable, arrogant fire.

     He would hold the course because she could not imagine him doing anything less.  It was a hypocritical thought; had the shoe been on the other foot, she had little doubt about what she would do.  She would put up a feeble struggle, but her heart would not be in it.  She would in all likelihood look forward to the end, embrace the moment when she could lay her burden down and sleep for the ages.  She was so very tired, so tired that the weariness poisoned her heart against the life it carried, and if someone had unknowingly offered the chance to slip unnoticed from the bonds of her life, she would have seized it with both joyous hands.  It wasn't suicide if someone else tightened the noose.

     But what she would do was unimportant.  She was not Professor Snape.  He was better than her, stronger.  He would persevere, weather this storm just as he had all the others before.  It would scar him, leave an indelible mark upon an already scarred soul, but the wound would not be mortal.  Life would not leave him yet.  She clung to this idea, repeated over and over again until it became an unwitting prayer.  _The wound will not be mortal.  Life will not leave him yet.  _Polysyllabic tendrils of faith moving over a desperate rosary.

     _Why does it matter?_

     Because if he falls, I fall.  There will be no help for me.  And because I've seen it before.

     The air shifted beside her right shoulder, and she realized that Seamus was there, head resting against the stone wall, arms folded across his chest   He was watching her gravely.

     "Hello," she said quietly.

     He nodded once in acknowledgement.  "You all right?' he asked.  "Been hiding in this corner all night."

     "I'm doing okay," she lied, deliberately avoiding his face, afraid of what she would see there.  "Any word on Harry?"

     "Nothing.  McGonagall said she'd keep us informed."

     She grunted.  No doubt she would.  Probably dole out hourly updates on his condition.  Potter would cause as much distraction lying toes-up and unresponsive as he did walking around on two sturdy legs.  The world would grind to a halt while they waited for him to awaken.

     _The boy didn't ask to be poisoned.  Have a bit of compassion,_ her grandfather groused.

     She was being cynical, but it was hard not to be after years living with the sick and dying.  Death and the struggle against it were no longer shocking.  They were an everyday part of her psychological landscape.  Where she came from, life went on in spite of the imminence of death.  It did not assume a holding pattern while it waited for the dirty business to end.  It kept going, hoping to outrun the ever-advancing shadow.

     _You didn't think so smugly when it was your friend on the sacrificial altar, did you?  _

     No, she hadn't.  She had fought and clawed and bargained with God, and when none of that had worked, she had wept, hard, keening screams that bubbled up from a reservoir of hate and terror.  There had been no clinical detachment then, no numbing shield against irrevocable loss.  It had been raw and alive, and when her friend was gone, she had expected the world to stop because it had stopped for her.  The sun had frozen in the sky, and the air had stunk of grief and death.  

     But the world had not stopped, and it never would.  It kept grinding along, spinning on its axis and casting off those too weak to maintain their grip.  No reprieve, no timeout, just unceasing life.  Potter's friends would learn that lesson eventually, though they would rue the knowledge and count it bitterest of all wisdom.

     They'd learn something else, too, something shameful and ugly that undermined all the dithering of the ancients about the greatness of man and his unique ability to sacrifice for his fellows.  For all the prattle about love and loyalty, should Death offer them the chance to follow Potter into the eternal darkness, they would not take it.  Their eyes would weep until they bled, and their hearts would shatter into a thousand pieces, but they would refuse the proffered, skeletal hand and flee once more into the safety of the light.  

     _Just like I did._

     "What will happen now?' she heard herself asking.

     "Don't know.  The Ministry will probably send Aurors to arrest Snape.  They'll probably hold him for trial at Azkaban, and when it's over, he'll be Kissed."

     "Kissed?"

     "You don't have Dementors over there, do you?' he asked, cocking an eyebrow.  "Anyway, a Kiss is when a Dementor sucks out your soul.  Your body keeps on living, but you're just a shell, really."

     She stared at him, horrorstruck.  The possibility that they would reduce Professor Snape to the level of a breathing vegetable and not allow him at the very least the dignity of death had not occurred to her.  She saw him in a cramped, filthy cell, lank hair matted and tangled in snarled clumps, rocking and crooning in his own rancid shit with no thought to who he was or even his humanity.  She suddenly felt like throwing up.

     "They wouldn't really-," she began weakly, and then trailed off.

     "Yes, they would, and it would be no more than he deserved," Seamus declared fiercely.

     She fought to hold her ground.  The urge to turn tail and flee was a ravenous compulsion.  The muscles of her arm twitched with it.  She was seeing it again, just as she had in the Potions classroom and on a day long before that when another lamb had been summoned to the slaughter.  The tang of fear and the salty smell of blood winnowed into her nose and throat, and she whimpered in her throat.

     "You all right?" the wolf that wore Seamus' face asked, the lupine, glistening grin belying the concern in its voice.

     "I th-th-think I'm going to be sick," she stammered, and without another word, she lurched past him and up the stairs to the girls' dormitory.

     She crawled into bed without her customary bath and shivered, listening for Filch's impatient rap upon the portrait, but it never came.  She was not surprised, and the cramp of unease in her stomach tightened.  One by one, her Housemates came to bed, their shadows twisting and writhing as they undressed in the flickering candlelight.  Furtive puffs of breath, and then darkness, a darkness that encroached and stalked, squeezing and clutching with insistent, greedy fingers.

     She lay awake, listening to their rasping, uneasy breaths and the occasional moan as dreams veered into the territory of nightmares.  When exhaustion finally overcame her, she dreamed of feral, lupine grins and dead black eyes that rolled as jaws opened wide.  She dreamed of spiders and flies and whispered lullabies, of shining mahogany hairs embedded in a mattress made of bone and soaked with blood.  She dreamed of Judith, and of Seamus, whose teeth were too long and too sharp.  Just before she woke, she dreamed of Professor Snape, ivory neck thrown back to expose a ragged hole where the throat had been.  They had come for him in the night, and they had claimed him.

     When she awoke the next morning, unrested and wary, her pillow was damp, as though she had wept in the night.  She went to breakfast without a word.

     __

  


	23. Toil and Trouble

Chapter Twenty-Three

To Heywood of the GAFF board.  Because everyone forgets.

     While Rebecca was dueling with her demons behind fluttering, uneasy eyelids and Draco was sending an owl to his father filled with glowing details of Slytherin's triumph, Snape was hunkered in the Potions classroom, meticulously measuring the contents of every one of his jars and phials.  He sat at his desk, his face hidden behind a barrier of distorting glass, and poured fine white powder into his measuring scales.  His own ghostly image scowled back at him from a dozen smudged glass jars.

     _Nine hundred and twenty-four point two grams.  _He checked the number against the results recorded in the ledger by his left hand.  _Nine hundred and twenty-four point two_.  Just as it should be.  He crossed arsenic from his list of poisons to be measured and sat back with a sigh, running a hand through his hair.  Already his eyes were strained and hot; the inside of his eyelids seemed to have been replaced by sandpaper.  He still had a long night ahead of him.  He had been through one hundred and twenty jars, but there were still well over seven hundred to go.  

     He knew he should keep his nose to the grindstone, but he was just too damn tired.  Perhaps the weight of what had happened was settling on his shoulders, a leaden mantle of assumed guilt, but he was filled with an inexplicable ennui.  It was much easier to sit here in this chair and watch the shadows consume the walls and swallow the wavering torchlight.  His squinting eyes relaxed, dissolving the minute stress lines there.  He closed them, slowly rotating his head to release the tension coiled in his neck.  Maybe he would sit here all night, until the torches guttered and sent their spirits spiraling toward the heavens in an acrid wisp of smoke.  He would wilt with them, match them inch for inch, drooping lower and lower in his chair, finally slipping bonelessly to the floor to join the puddling darkness there.  In the morning, when Filch and the others came to look for him, they would find only his black robes, his cloak, and his boots.  The rest of him would have escaped this madness, slipped beyond the reach of Potter and of this castle.

     But escape would not be so easy for him.  He had obligations, and he could not shirk them.  Even when he was a full-fledged Death Eater, he had taken his oaths seriously.  If Voldemort ordered him to kill an adversary, he did it, regardless of the risk to himself or his personal repugnance for the task.  He had considered it part and parcel of the unwritten contract he had signed the night he had seared his flesh and his soul with the Dark Mark.

     _To complicate matters even further, you've developed a distressing sense of morality._

     Oh, I've always had morality, just not one with which most would feel comfortable.  If I recall, it was really much simpler.  I did whatever was necessary to keep myself alive, and to hell with everybody else.  Quite a tidy philosophy.

     Much tidier than the maelstrom of conflicting emotions he felt now.  He supposed he had Albus to thank for that.  Albus, with his beatific nature, his fathomless ability to forgive and trust, and his frightening wisdom.  Damn that man.  Damn his pity and his unwavering faith.  If it weren't for those things, the solution would be so simple.  He would leave a note of resignation and flee, shrug off the unwelcome constraints of ethical responsibility and exile himself to Albania, Transylvania, or some other godforsaken wasteland where he could surrender to the constantly tugging emptiness.  

     Part of him still wanted to do just that.  The old inclinations still lived in him, though they slumbered.  The fact that he had chosen the narrower road did not mean that he wasn't tempted to let his feet stray to the surer road, step over to the easier, downward path.  He could hide, and maybe if he ceded to the anger and selfishness that had governed him for so long, he would sleep more deeply, at last draw from the well of inner peace from which others drank so freely.  The effort to rein in his darker, more honest nature was taking its toll.  He felt far older than his thirty-seven years, and at times like these, he remembered his years of cold depravity with perverse fondness.

     But he had expended too much effort on his grudging redemption to turn back now.  It would be inexcusable cowardice.  And, try as he might, he could not shake Albus from his mind.  Albus wouldn't understand.  He would grasp the logic of his betrayal; he knew better than anyone the agonies he suffered in the name of expiation, saw the aftereffects of them with pained blue eyes.  But in his heart, in that shining, pure wellspring from which his presence radiated, he would lament bitterly, question why the man he had trusted so fully had wronged him.

     So acquiescence to his first instinct was out of the question.  As was wasting any more time in useless pontification.  He sat up and reached for the next decoction on his list, wincing as the joints of his wrist creaked.  He turned the jar's label toward him and read it.  _Atropine.  _A Muggle substance used to treat heart attacks, as he recalled.  He'd ordered it specially, intending to see if its individual properties could be distilled, but with the workload and trying to prepare utterly catatonic fifth-years for their O.W.L.S., he hadn't managed to find the time.  Yet another way in which the little ingrates sapped the life from his bones and the vigor from his spirit.

     He carefully unscrewed the jar, set the lid on the desk, picked up the jar, and poured its clear liquid contents into a graduated cylinder.  He waited for the sloshing to still, then read the line at which the atropine stopped.  _Five point three fluid_ _ounces.  _He cross-referenced with his records.  _Five point three fluid ounces._  As expected.

     This was absolutely ridiculous.  He was certain that no one had touched the contents of his toxic stores.  He took far too much care.  What opportunity would they have possibly had?

     _If you truly believe that, then why do always feel as though there is something you've forgotten, something just beyond your reach, a subcutaneous itch you can't quell?  Why must you constantly fight the urge to pace and tap your chin, two things you always do when doubt assails you?_

     Because it was Potter, that was why.  A sound of self-disgust escaped him at the admission.  Had this been anyone else, he might have been confident enough in his recollections and his procedures to assert his innocence, but because it _was_ Potter, he had no choice but to check everything.  Hatred for the boy rose in his throat in a lump of greasy bile, and he swallowed with an effort.  In spite of all his blustering about refusing to treat the boy any better than anyone else, he had fallen into the same mothering, overprotective trap as his colleagues.

     He thought back to the nearly compulsive handwashing with fierce loathing.  He would never have thought himself so weak, but there he had been, mincing about like a newly weaned intern.  He snorted and shoved his leather-bound records ledger from him.  Of course, he'd rationalized it with a bunch of palaver about hygienic conditions, but the truth was that he had known all along that he was behaving contrary to his normal modus operandi.

     _Well, good to see that the time-tested Slytherin tenet of covering one's backside is still alive and well in you,_ he thought furiously.  A chuff of sardonic mirth slipped from his mouth.

     He looked at the endless sea of glittering glass in front of him and groaned softly.  This was hopeless.  Five days was not enough time.  It would take him at least ten, and that was with the help of a well-trained seventh-year, which was how he normally took inventory.  Without an assistant, it would take two weeks, maybe more.  He sighed and pulled the next jar toward himself.

     From the corner of his eye, he saw the empty classroom, and he suddenly felt strange being there without the improbable form of Miss Stanhope dancing on the periphery of his vision, without hearing the steady _clop _of her cutting knife as she toiled.  She had become a fixture, and the eerie stillness of her absence was stark and unsettling.

     _You've come unhinged, pining for the biggest calamity ever to curse these corridors._

     All the same, he wished she was there, if for no other reason than to have someone at whom he could snarl and snipe and direct his unfocused rage.  He considered sending Filch for her.  The old coot would hiss and grouse, but Snape could give a damn.  Filch's personal comfort was not his concern.  What mattered was that he would come with Stanhope in tow, and once she arrived, he would no longer be alone with his troubling thoughts.

     _Since when have you needed company, protection from your own musings?  Solitude is your sanctuary, in case you've forgotten._

     He hadn't forgotten.  In fact, he was more acutely aware of that than ever, but having her there seemed natural, a sign that all was normal, and he sensed that he would need that illusion very much in the days to follow.  He could take sparse comfort from the mental chess they played, distract himself from the looming threat he faced.  He could make good use of his time rather than fritter it away conducting a fruitless search of obscure poisons, some of which had clearly not been opened in months, even years.

     She would come.  In spite of the late hour and the lengthening shadows, she would obey the summons.  She would knock on his door, and when he bid her enter, she would lurch in, hair tousled and eyes bleary with sleep.  She might even come still garbed in her nightdress, and there she would sit, blinking owlishly at him and awaiting further instructions, and when he churlishly and unreasonably ordered her to begin a Camoflous Draught at half past eleven, she would do it without question.  And he was sure that when her cutting knife took up its monotonous cadence, his jangling nerves would quiet, and the real thinking could begin.

     Perhaps he could put her to work helping sort through this mess.  He quickly dismissed the idea with a derisive snort.  Her coordination was abysmal, and the first time a torch popped or sputtered, her scrawny, malnourished arms would flail and knock everything to the floor in a tinkling avalanche of broken glass and a dust cloud of scattered powders.  With his fortunes of late, she would likely inhale a lethal toxin and have to be carried, frothing and convulsing, to the infirmary, where she would be laid beside Potter, another unwarranted mark against his name and another knot in his noose.

     Still, he could not rid himself of the desire to see her gaunt, pointed face and those too-perceptive eyes that followed him wherever he went.  She knew something, he was sure of it.  Whether she was aware of what she knew was debatable, but he thought that if he prodded her enough, she would tell him.  For reasons he couldn't decipher, she had decided to leave her razed defenses as they were, at least as far as he was concerned.

     _Making excuses to see your mirror, are you?_

_     She is _not_ my mirror.  She's a sphinx, an unbreakable, unreachable, indecipherable enigma.  She knows, but won't say, damn her._

     He thought back to the eternal seconds before pandemonium had erupted in his classroom, the hanging, heartbeat moments when her frenzied eyes had locked with his, and she had mouthed, _Get away, get away_.  Quick and soundless, a fleeting cipher.  There had been bleak, inescapable knowledge in her face, and in her terror she had looked at once ancient and young.  There were answers in her riddles, but he could not interpret them.

     Runes and allusions, that was what she was handing him, doling them out precisely, like a trail of rough pebbles that led inexorably to preordained truth.  She had been doing it since the inexplicable vision in the Potions classroom, when she had seen and heard things he had thought only he would ever know, memories not to be seen until he brought the devil his dowry.  Later that night in his parlor, she had held out a tantalizing, shining pearl, but before he could grasp it, McGonagall had intruded, and Stanhope had snatched it away again, returning it to the deep well of cryptic musings from whence it had come.

     _She wants…_

_     (I don't think I can save you)_

     Get away, get away.

The more he pondered them, the less sense they made.  He was accustomed to logic, to cool calculation, to exact measurement.  Disjointed mutterings and esoteric imagery were the province of Trelawney or Vector.  He cursed himself for his inability to piece together the puzzle.  The fact that he lacked all the pieces was of no consequence.  He had solved more with less.  He was simply overlooking something.  But what?

     _Call her.  She'll tell you, and if she doesn't, you can make her talk.  You have ways._

     He stiffened, his jaw setting in a hard line.  It would be a cold day in Hell before that would happen.  Occlumency, was, to be perfectly blunt, a crude mind-fuck of grotesque proportions, and while he was quite content to use it on Lord Voldemort, he could not bring himself to inflict it upon her.  It would be a far worse sin than the bruise he'd branded into the thin flesh of her shoulder or the perverse predations which undoubtedly played themselves out in McGonagall's mind.  That was an avenue he refused to explore.

     _I might as well just go to Gryffindor Tower and have my way with her if my mind is sniffling those tracks.  It would be kinder._

     He knew more than he cared to about violation of the mind; Voldemort was an excellent teacher who had no qualms about teaching his pupils through firsthand experience.  He could no longer count the times he had knelt before his former Lord, whom he loathed with every fiber of his being, and was forced to divulge the secrets of his mind, heaving them up with violent emotional retchings.  He remembered the feel of cold, inhuman fingers tearing at his mind, prying at the locked doors and sealed vaults with arrogant entitlement and malignant avarice.  He shivered.  So far, the fortress where he hoarded his most dangerous memories had withstood Voldemort's rapacious plunderings, but he constantly feared the collapse that must surely come.  No structure could hold up forever.  Eventually time and use would wear it down, and his stronghold had seen much of both.

     Such a torture was crueler than mutilation or death, especially to those who held their minds sacrosanct.  Stanhope _was_ her mind, a consciousness, a sentience living in a ramshackle frame, a will stronger than its housing.  If he broke her mind in a moment of careless blundering, there would be no salvaging it.  It was a delicate, interlocking mechanism, each part drawing its strength from another.  If even one were to be damaged with the tiniest hairline fracture, then the whole thing would come crashing down, imploding in a cloud of rubble and dust.  Where once a shrewd, formidable young woman had sat would be little more than a tottering husk.  As a teacher, as a man, he could not justify such needless destruction.  It reminded him too much of earlier days.

     _Who's to say she'd break?  She might resist you._

     It certainly was possible that she would sit patiently through his explorations and never reveal a thing, never waver beneath his scrutiny.  He could well imagine her flat, appraising gaze, her silent endurance as she rebuffed his assault.  She was strong and had not yet been sorely tested, but her very youth might well undermine her, and that was a risk he was not willing to take.

     _All this is a rather eloquent way of saying you owe her._

     He bristled.  He supposed he did, though he would have preferred not to be reminded.  He liked his conscience better when it was buried underneath layers of resentment and practiced indifference.  Heeding it was an uncomfortable, unfamiliar action.  His mind conjured up a Muggle fairytale he'd read, "The Princess and the Pea."  At the time, his only comment had been to snort at the gormless child's stupidity for sleeping with a blasted pea beneath her mattresses and toss the book into the bin, but now he could almost sympathize with her plight.  His conscience's pressure was gentle but insistent, and it annoyed him to teeth-gnashing distraction.

     _You're becoming uncannily Gryffindoran in your reasoning._

     A low growl escaped him.  He'd go to the Dementors bearing roses and wine before he started spouting platitudes of self-sacrifice and unthinking courage.  It was just that he could not blot from his memory the knowledge that, when offered the opportunity to invade the deepest, most vulnerable part of him, she had chosen not to seize it.  She had simply gripped the door handle and swung it shut.  He could still hear the echo of the heavy wooden door connecting in its frame, the finality of that clunk.  For it, he would leave her undisturbed.

     _Stop this ridiculous pontificating and call her.  She'll either tell you or she won't, but you'll never know if you keep waffling like an indecisive twit._

     He very nearly did it.  He was out of his chair and halfway to the door before his mind caught up with his purposeful feet.  A glance at the hourglass on the far edge of his desk told him it was nearly midnight.  It would be folly for him to wake her up at this hour, even if he did want company for his misery.  McGonagall would hear of it, no doubt, and start a flap in the morning, one just obnoxious enough to attract the attention of the rest of the staff and the gossip-hungry students gathered over their porridge and toast in the Great Hall.  Even Albus would look at him askance.  Students out of bed after midnight were seldom up to noble deeds.

     _Brilliant.  Yet more grist for McGonagall's unending mill of suspicion._

     _Exactly.  Not to mention would the Ministry would make of it._

     The Ministry.  Ministry officials had just enough imagination to make them dangerous.  In their minds, brooding Slytherin professor plus impressionable young female student equaled either contamination or sordid collusion.  Simple detentions would be perverted into hideous, diabolical cabals in which he and Stanhope partook of blood and the flesh of infants.  She would be dragged off for every physical and psychological examination under the sun, and he would be bombarded with stupefying quantities of Veritaserum, and they would both be systematically torn to pieces until the truth was uncovered, or at least a version of the truth that best suited the powers that were.  That he and Stanhope had been reduced to mindless, quivering wrecks of humanity in the process would be of no consequence.

     She would have to stay away, much as the oppressive emptiness of the room and the unwelcome cessation of their duel pained him.  If he let her in tonight, he ran the risk, however infinitesimal, of contaminating any exculpatory evidence.  When the inspection was complete, their sparring sessions could resume, but until then, Miss Stanhope would cease to exist.

     _And if the Ministry hauls you off to Azkaban before that happens?_

     That was an eventuality he would ponder when he came to it.  For now, he had to concern himself with proving that whatever had felled Potter had not come from his stores.  Which he would never do if he persisted in letting his mind meander along these absurd paths.  He returned to his desk and sat down with an irritated thump, pulling his ledger and another jar toward himself.

     Row after row of small, neat handwriting greeted him, and he smiled bitterly at it.  That tidy penmanship had cost him dear.  It was one of the few things his father had insisted upon; other than that, he took no notice of his only son.  Virtually invisible until it was time for his writing lessons.  Then he filled his father's world, and for him, Snape, there had been nothing beyond that heavy desk and the ominously blank parchment in front of him.  Touch quill to ink and quill to paper and write until the page was filled.  Wrist twined and floated across paper, and beneath its susurrating, furtive caress writhed supple serpents wrought of simple thought.  Serpents filled with poison from the first coil to the last.

     From the age of six until he fled his father's house forever at seventeen, that had been the ritual between them every afternoon.  His father, from whom he had inherited his nose and complexion, would summon him to the study and set before him that single blank piece of parchment.  Then he would sit quietly while he watched his son fill it from first to last.  One mistroke, one hesitation, and the parchment would be ripped from beneath his scrabbling quill, replaced by another pristine sheet.  Not until one complete sheet had been filled without error would he be permitted to leave.  He had gone to bed hungry on many nights.

     His wrist throbbed with bitter memory, and he slowly flexed his fingers to ease the cramp.  How he had hated those writing lessons, how his stomach had burned and knotted each time his reluctant feet led him to the door of his father's study.  The cold brass of the doorknob had scorched his fingers, and the heavy, musty reek of the obscenely red carpet had clogged his nostrils like a miasma.  The first thing he had done upon inheriting the house was rip out that carpet and burn it.  A weight had loosened in his chest at the sight of it being immolated, running like tacky blood into the starving soil.  Then he had sealed the room.  He had never set foot in it again.

     Now, twenty years since he had last taken up that galling quill, his neat, elegant handwriting stared back at him.  The irony that something beautiful came from such horrid, unrelenting tedium was not lost upon him.  Indeed, he had carried that principle with him into his chosen profession.  What was potions-making if not the crafting of the exquisite from the mundane, the tedious?  

     Stanhope could have appreciated the veracity of that statement.  She was well-versed in the mind-numbing minutiae of the trade-the cutting, the grinding, the measuring.  That she was nothing short of appalling in their actual execution was wholly irrelevant.  She understood the importance of the mechanics, even if she hated them.  Had not Fate been so capriciously cruel, she might have made an excellent Potions Mistress.

     In truth, seeing her hunched over her jackal meat with such earnest concentration often gave him a nasty start; in her attitude, she reminded him forcibly of his own youth, crouched and silent and fierce as she persevered in her unspoken defiance.  In his less guarded moments, he could almost applaud her cheek.  It was his hauteur reflected through the echoes of time, undiluted by the passage of years, and it was fascinating.  The same harshness, the same careless, unrepentantly selfish sense of self-preservation; it was all there, looking out of a face too young to know so much.

     Pushing the uncomfortable recollections and abstract musings from his mind, he set to work, weighing and assessing one jar and phial after another, the motion of his reaching arm becoming fluid and automatic.  He no longer saw the individual containers, only a label and a weight.  The light heft of glass in his hands, the cool press of metal or the earthy warmth of cork against his fingertips as he opened them.  There and gone as one supplanted the next.  Time ceased to exist for him, and he did not hear it when the torches sputtered and hissed.  He was blind to the skulking shadows that swallowed his walls.  The entire scope of his world dwindled to jars and scales and an immaculately penned ledger.

     He had been keeping the ledger for as long as he had been teaching Potions.  He could still clearly remember buying the first of many at Flourish and Blotts.  They were always the same, glossy chestnut leather with delicate, gilt-edged pages.  A bit ostentatious for their use, perhaps, but their dignified, utilitarian elegance appealed to him.  He always felt a smug prick of pride when he glanced at his bookshelf and saw them there, well-oiled bindings gleaming in the shimmering torchlight.

     He kept them to assure the safety of his feckless, negligent charges and to protect himself from situations such as this.  Every two weeks, he inventoried the toxins in his possession, counting every last granule.  An accounting was also taken after any class in which poisons were used.  It was a system that had served him well for seventeen years; no student had ever fallen ill on his watch.

     _Until now._

     He shifted in his chair, banishing the thought.  Reach.  Grab. Inspect.  Open.  Pour.  Weigh.  Consult.  The pattern repeated itself, and soon the numbness of unconscious industry reasserted itself.  Sharper concerns faded into insignificance.  He became acutely aware of the motion of his hand drifting across the page as he signed his name to verified weights, the graceful, whorling lilt of the _S_, the sensuous plunge of the _V_.  The crisp scratch of his quill etched itself into his ears, and the work ground on.

     Hours passed, and the shadows grew longer, stretching forth spidery fingers to caress his cheek.  Soon, even the torches could not stay the cold, and it crept beneath the doorframe to wrap around his ankles and settle on his chest.  His breath plumed as he worked, hanging in the frigid air a moment before disappearing like slow-moving smoke.  He made no move to warm himself.  He was accustomed to the cold and considered it part of his penance.  When the icy glass of the jars and phials burned his fingertips, he ignored it, pressing the chapped flesh yet closer to its torment with masochistic indifference.

     His eyes burned as he pulled the next jar toward himself.  He was tired, and he knew he should stop and get some sleep, but the motions of his toil had taken on a life of their own.  They simply happened, independent of his thought or will.  He wondered briefly if he would be able to stop, or if his hand and arm would reach and pull all night, until the last of the jars was gone and the surface of his desk was once more a barren plain.  Maybe they wouldn't stop even then.  Perhaps they had become so taken with their appointed tasks that they would continue to reach for things no longer there, phantom phials only they could see.  

     An image of his hand floating dreamily before him as he taught first-year Potions, fingers twitching and grasping daintily, paddling the air like disoriented spiders, came to him, and he snorted incredulously.

     _You must be tired, Severus, if you're turning such ridiculous fancies.  This is your last jar._

     He unscrewed the lid and carefully poured the contents into the waiting brass scales.  His hand trembled with fatigue, and he gritted his teeth in frustration until it steadied.  The last of it slipped into the scale with a dry, wintry puff of white powder.  He set the empty jar down with an exhausted thump and gently calibrated the slowly swaying scales.  When they stopped, he squinted at the miniscule numbers, forcing his blurring vision to focus.  _One thousand, three hundred and forty point ninety-three grams._  His gritty eyes trailed to the ledger, where his finger was already tracing a line from the word _cyanide _to the last recorded measurement.

     His heart, which had been larruping briskly inside his chest, suddenly seemed to freeze, thudding painfully against his ribcage.  His vision doubled, then trebled, and he blinked, trying to dispel the illusion before them.  His hands, which had moved so deftly all evening, now carried a thousand pounds, and he let them sink to the desktop, where they opened and closed feebly.  His eyes fastened to the number on the page, his acuity so painful that he could detect individual pores on the parchment, see where the ink had infused to the paper.

     _It cannot be.  _

     His heart, heavy as a brick, spasmed with confusion and a slowly coiling fear.  He couldn't stop looking at the number.  It burned itself into his retinas.  He closed his eyes in an attempt to regain his precarious equilibrium, and it danced and shimmered against the darkness of his eyelids.  He swallowed and coughed as the thick spittle lodged in his throat.  He opened his eyes and looked down at the page that would damn him.

     _One thousand, four hundred point forty-seven._

     Fifty-nine point five grams were missing.  A more than lethal dose.  It was impossible.  No one had opened that jar for anything other than inventory purpose for more than a year.  Cyanide was not a very common potion ingredient, at least not in educational circles.  It was too potent, too dangerous.  It was used primarily in potions of torture or permanent incapacitation, neither of which was in high demand at Hogwarts.  He had been the last person to use it, and he had made absolutely certain that he had measured it in triplicate before putting it away.  And he would swear on Albus Dumbledore's life that there had been exactly forty-nine point four ounces in that jar the last time he'd put it away and turned the key.

     _That's not what the scales in front of you say._

He slammed his hands down upon the desk, sending his quill clattering to the floor.  The glass jars tinkled merrily, unmoved by his blind fury.  His palms throbbed in wounded remonstrance, so he slammed them down again, punishing them for their unwelcome temerity.  In a fit of uncharacteristic histrionics, he seized the ledger and threw it across the room.  It struck the opposite wall with a satisfying smack and sank to the floor with a heartbroken hiss, its mangled pages sticking out like broken limbs.

     _Well, that achieved absolutely nothing.  You're behaving like a put-upon child,_ he chided himself.

     He leaned back in his chair and exhaled slowly, bringing his fingers to his throbbing temples.  His arms felt like knotted marble, and he willed them to relax.  Giving in to panic would get him nowhere.  Now, more than ever, he needed to exercise his vaunted self-control.  Sniveling and charging off half-cocked was something Sirius Black would do.  He had done many egregious and ill-advised deeds in his lifetime, but conducting himself like addled, impetuous Sirius Black would _never _beone of them.

     He rose from his chair, his knees crackling like dry brush, and moved wearily toward the ledger.  He flexed his toes inside his boots, sending blood and warmth to his cold feet.  As he drew closer, he turned the problem in his mind, looking for a suitable explanation, some obscure revelation that would set things to rights again, make sense of a world gone temporarily mad.  Dexterous fingers riffled swiftly through the labyrinth of his memories, searching for the innocuous key that would unlock the mystery.  Where was it?  It was here.  It had to be here.  He had always been able to find whatever he needed here.  It had sustained him, kept him strong, even after he had shunned the trappings and comforts of the outside world.  

     Memory after memory, he searched through the crannies and dusty recesses of the dimly remembered moments of his past.  Staff meetings, private tutoring sessions with hopeless Slytherins, detentions before they became the exclusive domain of Rebecca Stanhope and her watchful, knowing eyes.  Had there been anything, even the slightest probing tug on his lifeforce?  Had there been any moment when those stalwart defenses had been breached, any time when he could have been distracted from the telltale twinge of interlopers treading on forbidden ground?

     Something snagged between his fingers and wriggled there, slippery as a greased eel, but when he tried to drag it to the surface, it retreated, diving once more into the murky depths of little-noted subconsciousness.  He reached for it anyway, hoping to snatch it from the black pool, but it was gone.  He hissed through gritted teeth, his hands unconsciously fisting at his sides.  Never quite fast enough.  That was becoming a disturbing trend as far as he was concerned.

     _If only I'd been a bit quicker with Potter, I wouldn't be here now.  _

     That was useless self-blame, and he knew it.  There was nothing he could have done to save Potter.  His fate was sealed the moment that potion crossed his lips.  He had never seen it coming.  Short of heroically knocking the phial from Potter's grudging hands and making a complete ass of himself, what options did he have?

     _Well, you could have done exactly that._

     He snorted.  The very idea was repugnant to him.  He'd be roasted on an ungreased griddle before he'd flit about the classroom dithering balefully and forlornly about inevitable doom.  That was Sybil Trelawney's forte, and any competition was likely to turn her myopic Inner Eye green with jealousy.  As it was, there had been no reason to behave that way, no sign at all that anything was amiss.

     _You should have checked it before you gave it to him._

     His pace quickened as anger took hold again.  He _had_ checked it, dammit!  He had done both a visual and an olfactory test.  The Advanced Sleeping Draught had been clean on both counts.  There had certainly been no trace of cyanide in it when he had handed it to Potter, no tart, lingering scent of bitter almonds.

     _What about after, when he collapsed?  Was it there then?_

     He froze in mid-step and let his upraised foot drift bonelessly to the floor.  His hands relaxed, and he brought them together, the thin fingers twining sinuously in languid concordance with his thoughts.  Had there been?  His eyes narrowed as he forced himself backward through the tortious passages of time, fighting against the natural compulsion to move forward.  Bare stone, cool and damp, scraped against claustrophobic shoulders, and the weight of apprehension settled on his chest like a corrupted familiar.

     _The eerie silence enfolded him again.  Bewildered eyes stared back at him.  They were as real now as they had been then, and he resisted the urge to shiver.  Trapped in a moment of total recall, he could feel the clammy solidity of Potter's chest beneath his hands, and the bruising sting of the stone floor under his knees.  He tasted salty sweat on his upper lip, heard the whistling of air past his ear that was the only sound in the absolute stillness.  The weight of the looking glass had returned._

_     Where?  Where was it?  He groped for it.  In front of him lay the twinkling, jagged shards of the broken phial, and he understood that the mocking fragments held the answer between their cutting, glistening fingers.  His vision sharpened, and he saw minute beads of potion clinging to the serrated edges, dangling there like lethal amber pearls.  He tried to reach for it, bring it to his nose and inhale its fragile, murderous secret, but his hands were cemented to the flesh of Harry's chest.  A chest that logic told him should not be there._

This is a flashback, only a flashback.  You can leave it anytime you wish_._

_     The thought was intended to be reassuring, but he was no longer certain it was true.  He willed his arms to move, his hands to break their flesh to flesh pact, but nothing moved.  The bits of shattered glass with their precious beads of truth remained out of reach, and he gave muffled howl of exasperation._

Use your nose_._

_     Of course.  A discerning nose was the prize instrument of any Potions Master, more necessary than scales, calibrators, or alembics.  His nose, derided all his life, had served him well over the years, allowing him to perfect his craft, become pre-eminent in his field, and it would do no less for him now.  Relief washed over him, making him weak.  His hands sank into Potter's chest, and the boy's sternum creaked._

_     He took a deep breath, imbibing the myriad scents that wafted on the unseen air, smells that would have gone unnoticed by anyone else.  He drank them in, letting the sodden air wash over his nasal passages in a flood of spices and salts, light perfumes and obtrusive tangs.  His sensitive nerve endings worked frantically to sort and classify the tide of information._

_     At least, that was what should have happened; the sensory lines were standing by, thrumming expectantly, but nothing happened.  There was nothing to sort out, not even the musty, dry wheat smell of dust.  The air, the unseen transport of even the faintest of odors, was utterly clean.  Even sterile operating salons, expunged of the least trace of contamination, carried a smell, a pungent reek of antiseptic.  But this air, the close air of a dungeon room filled with thirty horrified, fear-glazed bodies, was blank._

Not yet breathed.  Not yet made.

     Don't be a fool.  It's only further proof that you're hallucinating.

_     Oh, how he wished that were true.  He wished for it with all the formidable force of his will.  But if this really was a hallucination brought on by exhaustion and ill-digested guilt, why, then, was there not some lingering vestige of reality beneath the illusion?  Why couldn't he feel the chill that just a few minutes ago had fogged his breath and cramped his toes inside his boots?  Why couldn't he smell his own sour sweat?_

_     It occurred to him then that perhaps he had become ensnared in his own mind, had fallen through the fine mesh that separated past and present, reality and recollection.  He had transformed, through a conglomeration of frayed nerves, an uneasy conscience, an undeniable fact written in his own hand, and an unhealthy preoccupation with a silent sybil that watched his every move, into an organic Time Turner.  The idea was so patently absurd that he reeled, and he suddenly found himself suppressing the urge to titter.  It was such an alien sensation that he nearly strangled on it._

I'm losing my mind_, he thought calmly, still frozen on the floor of the Potions classroom and looking up at thirty pairs of eyes that he knew were not there, eyes that in the world he knew to be, fluttered and dreamed beneath the impassive watch of Morpheus.  _

_     The logic of the assertion did nothing to dispel the illusion.  He remained rooted to the floor, and the students that weren't stayed in their seats.  The smooth, unyielding surface of Potter's chest was still beneath his palms, rising and falling gently.  And now there was something new, a steady, sonorous pounding, the sound of which incited an inexplicable terror.  The spittle of his mouth soured and dried, and a resonating echo of long-forgotten pain sliced across his temple.  _

I've done this before_._

_     Though he could not remember it, it felt true, and he did not question it.  A sense of cold familiarity settled over him, and his heart squeezed inside his chest.  He had done this before.  With her.  With Stanhope.  But she had been with him then.  She was on the other side of the castle and eight stories above him, wrapped in slumber.  How could this be happening?_

     Is she a natural Legimen?  Can she see me even now, through eight floors and two dimensions?

_     Such a possibility made him furious, and he tried desperately to seal off his mind, pushing against her as hard as he could, his head and neck throbbing with the exertion.  He waited for the scene before him to waver, for blessed reality to re-establish its grip upon his senses, but things remained as they were.  Not even the slightest ripple disturbed his surroundings._

     It's not her.  Calm down.  You're having an anxiety attack.  

     If I am, it will be the first.

_     His internal discourse was interrupted by renewed pounding, closer now, and the shadow-pain spiked into his temple a second time.  His eyes involuntarily squeezed shut, his rigid body's only defense against the onslaught.  It did nothing to dull the noise, a deep, doomsday throb that came with unflagging predictability.  Two bass drums, beaten in tandem._

_     He tried to rip his hands away from Potter's chest, to clamp them over his offended ears, but it was no use.  It was as though they had been fused in a cataclysmic coupling that could not be undone.  He hated the boy, irrationally, blindly, hated him for unwillingly binding their fates.  He tugged and tugged, determined to extricate himself, to escape.  He pulled until the flesh of his fingers shrieked in protest, but he could find no release._

_     The measured booms reached a reverberating crescendo, and then Headmaster Dumbledore and Madam Pomfrey appeared in the doorway.  The moment they crossed the threshold, the noise ceased.  It didn't fade; it simply no longer was.  Dumbledore's robes tickled his cheek as he passed, but there was no smell, no puffing of lavender-scented laundry soap and warm silk.  Madam Pomfrey bustled by to crouch at Potter's head, and the astringent smell of lemongrass that usually followed in her wake was absent.  _

_     There was something else amiss as well, though he couldn't quite put his finger on it.  Something with their appearance.  They looked flat, worn out, like badly made cardboard cutouts.  Dumbledore's robes, which should have been as bright and vibrant as Fawkes' scarlet plumage, was drab, and his eyes, for as long as he had known him a brilliant sapphire, were clouded and vague, cracked marbles pushed into his eye sockets._

It's wrong.  It's all wrong.  It's a terrible farce.  I want out.  I want out of this memory, this perversion of my memory_._

_     He tried to bring his mind back to the present, but like his body, it could not move.  It was wedged firmly in the blind passage between what had once been and what was.  The stale air that had not wanted to permit him retreat now refused his advance.  He threw himself against the invisible barrier that blocked his way, but it remained firm.  He was close to panic now.  Before and after had ceased to exist, it seemed.  This moment was all that was left._

_     I want to leave.  Why can't I leave?_

_     There is something you have to see._

_     What?  What can I see?  Everything is wrong here._

     Find what you are looking for.

_     The patience in that circular reasoning made him want to throw up his hands and shriek in impotent rage.  How could he find what he was looking for when he wasn't sure himself?  Even if he had known, there was no guarantee it could be found here.  This was not where things had happened; it was a gross parody, the work of a child trying to recreate that which it did not understand.  The perspective was skewed, and looking at it was giving him a headache._

_     "What happened, Severus?" the Headmaster asked, fixing him with what would have been a benign stare had not the eyes been so dull, so lifeless._

_     He closed his eyes, blotting out the travesty.  "I don't know, sir."_

Oh, but that was a lie.  You do know.  The ledger tells the story, and you're going to swing for it.  The Dementors will feast on your soul_._

_     "I think it's very important that we find out," said Dumbledore gravely._

_     It was, but not for him, not anymore.  Either way, his road had wound to its inescapable end.  He was going to a traitor's death, either as a Death Eater who had betrayed his Lord, or as an undeserving wretch that had shunned the last hope offered him, repaying kindness with malignant cruelty.  His future was a moot point._

_     A new sound disturbed the sepulchral silence that had descended on the room since the arrival of the Headmaster and Pomfrey.  It was little more than a whisper, but it grated on his ears like sandpaper.  He turned his head to see Stanhope pressed against the wall, hunched shoulders quivering.  She was looking at him, the glistening tracks of tears sliding down her face.  In the queer, shifting light, it looked like blood.  Her white face stood out in painful relief, and her eyes were blazing with frantic need.  His brows knitted in puzzlement._

_     "Do you see?" she asked, casting a fearful eye in the direction of the glamours parading around as Pomfrey and Dumbledore._

_     "See what?"_

_     "What you came for?"_

_     "No.  I can't find it.  Where is it?"_

_     She was clearly disappointed.  Her shoulders sagged.  "I don't know, either."_

_     Her eyes darted between her frozen classmates and the front of the room.  Her lip curled in a snarl, and she recoiled, pulling away from the rest of the students.  "I think it's time for you to go," she said._

_     He tore his gaze away from her and was horrified to see that Dumbledore and Pomfrey were disappearing, fading like sun-bleached portraits.  He could see the back wall of the classroom through the Headmaster's midsection, and Pomfrey's feet had dissolved into the floor, making it look as though it had swallowed them.  The sight made him dizzy, and he averted his eyes._

The dream is losing cohesion.  It's almost over.

     Not exactly.  Look at the students.

_     In front of him, the watching pupils had grown brighter, crisper, more defined.  It was as though they had leached the vitality from the castle walls and fed on it.  Organic vampires.  Their faces had changed, too.  They were no longer stony, waxen, and impassive.  They were wolfish, furtively expectant.  Some were gleeful.  A heavy stone dropped into the pit of his stomach._

_     "I think you should go now," Stanhope said from her corner, more insistently this time._

_     "I can't," he snapped, irritation bubbling to the surface like an unlanced boil._

_     She gave him a look that clearly said she thought he could, and then he felt a tremendous shove in the small of his back.  He pitched forward, praying he wouldn't smash his nose on the floor.  That was an indignity he would not have been able to bear.  The bottleneck trapping him between the past and the present let go with a vacuous pop, and he lurched forward, pinwheeling into a desk.  An empty desk._

He stood over the ledger, trembling violently.  He had somehow closed the last few feet between himself and the terrible truth without knowing it.  He swayed, feeling hollow and drained.  He was so bewildered that he nearly sank to the floor, but his innate sense of dignity would not allow it.  Instead, he stared drunkenly down at the ledger with its mutilated pages and blinked, trying hard not to vomit.

     It had happened again.  Just like in the Potions classroom.  He was terrified.  These visions, these hallucinations were like being torn in two and forced to watch as the halves struggled to rejoin.  It was cognitive dissonance.  He felt fractured and raw, and even as he pondered the reasons behind it, he knew he didn't care enough to go through it again.

     He stooped to pick up the ledger, feeling seventy instead of thirty-seven, and as he straightened, his fingers smoothed out the wrinkled pages.  It was an absent, compulsive gesture, but it also felt sane, reasoned, and so he embraced it.  He left the room, closing and locking the door behind him.  It was time to tell the Headmaster.

     Upstairs in her bed, Rebecca began to weep the tears she would find on her pillow in the morning. 


	24. Vigil

To Chrisiant, who keeps this wounded old soldier moving toward home, and to Bentley Little, who knows how to weave a story.

Chapter Twenty-Four

     Hogwarts, for all its life and vitality beneath the benevolent reign of the sun, was a very different place in the dark, interminable hours after midnight, the hours when even the stars have winked out.  Like the fragile creatures within its walls, it slumbered, dreamed.  It never divulged its dreams, for they were its own and not for human eyes to see, but one could feel the evidence of them all around.  It was beneath their feet and above their heads.  The very walls were redolent with them, and if one listened closely enough, carefully enough, it was said that you could hear the castle breathe.

     The infirmary was generally the quietest place of all, a place of reverential silence, a place void of the remotest sounds of human habitation.  No rustling of bedclothes, no harsh exhalation or murmurings of sleep-mad minds.  No patter of sticky feet as they fumbled in the dark for the lavatory.  Nothing.  Wind against the windows, fleeting as misting rain and the gentle shift of a curtain.  It was the complete and utter silence of an empty room.

     But now there was a sound, an incongruous sound for such a place.  It was a small, sharp, rhythmic clicking that resonated throughout the room, carried to all corners.  It was a haunting, forlorn sound, like dried chicken bones cast upon the fire, and yet the shadowy figure sitting in a chair beside one of the beds found it comforting, had for most of her eighty years.

     Professor McGonagall sat beside the inert, lifeless form of Harry Potter, and knitted.  She knit without purpose, letting her hands do as they would.  The slender, silver needles clacked on, creating from old memory whatever pattern they fancied.  Over.  Under.  Around.  Through.  The familiar waltz they had danced a thousand times.  In the end, she might find a sweater dangling from their gleaming tips, or perhaps a pair of socks.  It didn't matter as long as there was something there, something where there had been nothing.

     She had been knitting for as long as she could remember.  Her Aunt Hestia had taught her, showing her the technique with age-brittle fingers.  Later she had come to think of them as teacher's fingers.  Aunt Hestia, long dead, had been ancient even when she, Minerva, had been a child, and watching her wrinkled, leathery hands as they fashioned all manner of sweaters and afghans had been like watching the Fates weave the universe.

     _Hold the needles just there, Minerva.  That's right.  Now, loop the yarn; underneath you go.  Good, good.  Ah, a bit too much.  Better._

     Aunt Hestia's gravelly, age-worn voice whispered in her ear, and she was startled to feel the hot prickle of tears at the corners of her eyes.  She put down her knitting and reached for the box of tissues on the night table beside Potter's bed.  It was silly of her to be weeping; Aunt Hestia had been dead for more than fifty years, and the boy beside her was not yet lost, but she couldn't help it.  For the first time in her life, she was unsure of what to do.

     _Well, crying isn't it, _she told herself sternly, yanking off her spectacles and dabbing roughly at her eyes, as though rogue tear ducts were to blame for this uncharacteristic outburst of emotion.

     She could remember to the day the last time she had cried.  It wasn't something she did often.  It had been the day she'd learned of Peter Pettigrew's supposed heroic death at the hands of Sirius Black.  She'd absorbed the news with a heady, swooning horror, the newsprint of the _Daily Prophet_ swimming before her disbelieving eyes.  She'd nearly fainted, just managing to stagger to a chair and collapse into it.  The tears had come then, in a steady, leaking torrent, scalding her eyes and cheeks with the gentle bitterness of self-recrimination.

     Knowing what she knew now, she felt like a fool.  She had believed the lie, bought into the myth of his martyrdom.  It was little consolation to know that she had not been the only one.  Albus had believed, too.  Poor Albus, white as chalk and tottering in his seat at the memorial service.  It had been one of the rare times when she had seen him vulnerable, and she hated Pettigrew all the more for it.  

     _I even indulged in a bit of maudlin reverie at the Three Broomsticks on his behalf.  Pitying his pathetic memory._

Her lip curled in undisguised contempt at the recollection of sitting at a table with Hagrid and Cornelius Fudge in misty-eyed reminiscence and belated canonization of Gryffindor Lost, innocent, stupid, blindly courageous Peter, who had spent his life in the strangling shadow of his three best friends, and had escaped it by killing one and sending another to the hell of Azkaban in his place.

     _And we all thought he was so noble._

     Of course they had.  He had benefited from his long and fruitful association with the beloved Potters and their retinue and with the Order.  People as good and decent as the Potters certainly wouldn't have anything to do with the darkness, with the malignant evil that had infested the world like voracious parasites.  They would have known, smelled the sickly sweet rot of corruption on his skin.  They had loved him, and that had been good enough.

     _Let's be perfectly frank, Minerva.  That wasn't the only reason, was it?_

     She sighed and picked up her knitting again.  That was true enough.  Being a Gryffindor had counted for much.  Maybe too much.  Gryffindor was a name, an affiliation that could be trusted.  Those who carried it were heralded as the brightest and the best, the most suited for great and valorous deeds.  Distinction was expected of them.  None had been more purely Gryffindor than James and Lily, and because Peter was their friend, it was assumed he was much the same.  They had paid dearly for their blithe presumptuousness.

     _So has Harry, Circe bless him._

     The thought of his name brought her attention to the bed and the still figure that lay upon it, and her throat constricted with another spasm of grief.  All night he had lain there, a testament to their failure.  It was horrible to see him that way, and part of her was still trying to deny the truth.  Several times during her vigil, she had tried to tell herself that it wasn't really him.  It wasn't hard to almost believe it.  The Harry she knew exuded life and quiet vitality.  The thing on the bed was a wax effigy, and a poor one at that.

     It was odd, though, that in his tainted sleep, he looked peaceful, almost cherubic.  Years had fallen away from his face, and he looked like a boy again rather than an old man stuffed into a gangly boy body.  The frown lines around his mouth had been erased, and the constant crease in his forehead, the one that had been there since the middle of his first year, was gone.  His brow was smooth and untroubled, as any young boy's should be.

     _It's the spectacles.  He hasn't got them on.  That's why he looks so young._

_     Bollocks it is.  It's not like you to sugarcoat things.  You know better.  It's no secret why he looks the way he does.  It's a wonder he doesn't look worse, what, with the burden he carries._

     She jabbed a needle beneath a loop harder than was necessary and pricked the ball of her thumb, drawing blood.  She grimaced and brought the wounded digit to her lips, licking the bright bead of blood that had formed.  A disgusting habit, but not one that bothered her enough to break it.  The salty tang grazed her tongue, and her face contorted into a moue of disgust.

     _A vampire _and _a witch.  How novel.  A tissue would have done nicely.  Though having blood on your hands is quite fitting given what you were just pondering._

     Her eyes returned to Harry's face, and her heart ached when she saw the closed lids.  She wished they would open and reveal those luminous green eyes, even if it were only for a fleeting instant.  Lily's eyes, people said, and they were right.  They and his temper were the only things he had inherited from his mother; everything else belonged to James.

     He was the living legacy of his parents, and a constant reminder to the old guard of what they had lost, what their complacent ignorance had torn away from them.  Sometimes looking at him was physically painful.  The first time he had set foot in the Great Hall, she had nearly fainted from the shock.  He was the Mirror of Erised made flesh, an amalgam of the best of his parents.  It was as though the past had doubled back upon the present, and both she and Albus had been exceptionally solemn in the staff meeting that night, wandering the well-traveled paths of bitter memory.

     Albus especially blamed himself for what had happened fifteen years ago.  Even after all these years, she could still remember what he had told her a few days after the Potters had been murdered and their house blown to pieces.  _I should have known.  How could I not?  How could…_  He had broken off then, overcome, and his hands had been shaking so badly that the tumbler of brandy he'd been sipping in a vain attempt to settle his nerves had sloshed onto his desk, soaking the _Daily Prophet_ he had been reading.  She had had no answer for him, and she still didn't.

     Though her stubborn Scottish pride had never allowed her to admit it, she had shared his feeling of gross inadequacy, of staggering failure.  To this day, she asked herself why she hadn't seen the warning signs, had never seen it coming.  They had always been so careful, so scrupulous, but somehow, in all their vigilance, they had missed the direst threat of all.

     _We underestimated Peter.  We underestimated him, and in the morning, James and Lily were dead, another pair of corpses in He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's charnel house._

_     James and Lily made the same mistake._

_     Of course they bloody well did.  They were his friends.  Albus and I, we had no such excuse.  It was our job to be vigilant, to investigate every conceivable possibility, no matter how implausible.  But we didn't.  We were so convinced that black was black and white was white.  We never considered that there might be grays, or that even the most pristine things can be sullied over time.  We should have sent someone to check on them, to help ward off an attack._

_     All of this chest-beating and hair-tearing is utterly useless.  All the could haves and should haves in the world can't undo the past.  Let it go._

Maybe so, but it was hard to surrender the past when it walked about and stared you in the face.  James and Lily had gone and left Harry behind, and the orphaned child that had liberated the wizarding world had needled her uneasy conscience.  He had begun his life owed a monumental debt, a debt that could never be repaid, and it only continued to grow, accruing interest beyond calculation each time he beat back the darkness.

     What was it the Bible said?_  And the sins of the father shall be visited upon the sons, even unto the seventh generation._  That Muggle religious text was usually full of muddle-headed, pedantic, unrealistic balderdash, but she thought it was right about that.  She saw evidence of its veracity with her own world-weary eyes.  Not just in Harry, though he was certainly the most glaring example, but in poor Neville Longbottom.  He had lost his parents just as surely as Harry had, and anyone who would argue differently was a plain fool.  They breathed and voided, but they were dead all the same.  It had taken a single visit to St. Mungo's to drive that ugly truth home.

     She did what she could to ease their burdens.  Severus could howl all he liked about favoritism; she had bent the age restriction on Quidditch and the prohibition on first-years owning brooms for Potter because she considered it miniscule reparations for all that he had been denied and would be denied in the future.  Their failure to stop the Dark Lord had put him in this position.  He deserved pleasure, no matter how inconsequential it might be.

     The unchanging inertia of the boy frightened her.  She had never seen anyone in a true coma before, and she thought it was an uncanny mimicry of death.  She had seen dead bodies in her time, more than she wished to remember.  She had seen them arranged in quiet dignity at wakes and memorial services and heaped in bleeding, shifting dunes on war-ravaged battlefields.  She had been saddened and often disgusted by such sights, but none of them disturbed her as much as seeing Harry like this, trapped between two worlds, alive yet not living.

     She wondered if he was cold.  The coverlet was tucked beneath his chin, and he was not shivering, but she couldn't shake the idea that he must be frozen.  After all, what was life if not warmth?  She put down her knitting and reached out a tentative hand, stopping just short of touching his cheek.  It hovered in the darkness, trembling, and she had a fleeting image of Atropos' gleaming scissors poised triumphantly above the fraying thread of his life.  She pulled her hand back, her heart hammering in her chest.

     _That's absolutely mad.  You're no more Atropos than Albus is Charon.  It's perfectly all right to touch him._

Still, she hesitated.  She had never been of a maternal bent, and touching students was not something she usually did.  Touching one while he was unconscious struck her as lewd and invasive.

     _Afraid he'll awaken and think you're trying to violate him?  Really.  You're not Severus._

Disgusted by her unwarranted reticence, she lunged forward, grazing three fingers of her hand roughly along his jawline.  The touch was not as gentle as she had hoped, and his flesh dimpled beneath the pressure.  An unconscious sigh of relief escaped her when she discovered that it was neither feverish nor chilled and clammy.  It was flush with only the warmth from a sleeping child, still soft and pliable.  She let her hand linger a moment, drawing feeble assurance from its deceiving solidity.  Then she drew away and groped for her knitting.

     How could such a thing have happened, been allowed to happen again?  And to Potter, no less?  It was always the Potters.  The entire clan was cursed.  It was as though the Fates, weary of granting them unfettered prosperity, had decided to exact their long-delayed price.  The portentous Bible verse floated through her mind again, and she shifted uneasily in her seat, pushing her spectacles back onto the bridge of her nose.  

     _Superstitious poppycock, _her rational mind blustered, trying to banish the unsettling thought.

     _The Muggles think witches and wizards are superstitious poppycock, too, but we exist as surely as the sun.  And we most assuredly have curses and hexes.  You've seen firsthand the damage they can do._

She tutted softly.  She wished she knew what was wrong with him.  If she knew that, then something could be done, a course of action could be taken.  She hated doing nothing.  It was averse to her nature, to the nature of most Gryffindors, come to think of it.  They were practical, action-oriented.  The proof was in the performance.  Preparation and contemplation were the stuff of Ravenclaws.

     _And that devil-may-care attitude has gotten Harry into a pickle more than once._

     A wistful smile flickered across her mouth.  It certainly had, but until now, he had always come out of it by the skin of his teeth.  Battered and bruised, but essentially whole.  Privately, she thought him the avatar of Gryffindor virtue, that to which all the rest of her charges should aspire.  She never said so, of course; frankly, most of her children lacked the talent and sheer bravado that came so naturally to him, and she would be damned if they started sending pupils home in wreath-bedecked boxes because they had foolishly, fatally, grasped for dreams beyond their means.

     Madam Pomfrey had been working doggedly all night to answer the riddle of his illness, but so far it had proven a fruitless search.  Preliminary scans had picked up traces of a strange chemical, but it had yet to be identified.  They would likely need Severus' expertise for that.  In the meantime, Pomfrey had been doing her best with what little information she had, taking scans with her wand every hour on the hour and making meticulous notations in a ledger, fussing over his sheets, and fretting over him in an endearingly mother hen fashion.

     She was not surprised at any of it.  It was quintessential Pomfrey, quintessential Hufflepuff, and she was doing her House proud.  She had never been more grateful for its stalwart, tireless earnestness.  Pomfrey wouldn't rest until the mystery was solved and Potter was on his feet again.  Anything less than a complete recovery would be a personal affront.  She had gone to bed a few hours ago, hollow-eyed but determined, and watching her stagger wearily to her bedchamber, McGonagall had sent a blessing after her.

     It was unfortunate that they were dependent on Severus to get to the bottom of things.  If only Pomfrey's knowledge were more extensive.  The idea of Severus being involved in the investigation made her head spin.  If nothing else, it was an enormous, unforgivable conflict of interest.  The man had most likely poisoned Harry.  No sane man would allow him anywhere near the inquiry.  Albus should know better.

     _He does know.  But he also knows that there is no one else on staff capable of isolating and identifying the toxin, and he'll be bound to a skiff and set ablaze before he sends for the Ministry._

_     He should set his prejudice aside.  Harry's life is at stake._

_     You seem quite content to nurse _your_ grudge against Severus._

She bristled, her needle missing a loop.  That wasn't fair.  What she felt wasn't a grudge-it was incontrovertible fact.  Harry had fallen into this deplorable state while under his care.  He had access to both the ability and the opportunity to harm the boy, and he had made it quite plain over the years that he loathed him.  Any reasonable person would have drawn the same conclusion.  Personal dislike had nothing to do with it.

     _House affiliation has no influence, then?_

None.  She would have been equally suspicious of him had he been Head of Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff.  Severus, no matter his place or his pedigree was simply _bad._  What was worse, he was unrepentantly so.  He reveled in his malice the way others reveled in kindness and joy.  He would never change his ways.  The Light would kill him, scorch his skin.  Everyone could see it.  Everyone except Albus.

     Albus was the keeper of lost souls, the shepherd through the dark.  He attracted the wayward and the cast aside.  They came to him and loved him, and he nourished them with his faithfulness.  That was the way it usually turned out, but there had been exceptions.  Like Tom Riddle, who had taken the kindness shown him and perverted it to his own insidious ends.  Severus was treading the same blighted path, and with his treacherous hands, he had brought the hope of their world to its lowest ebb.

     _It could have been an accident._

The man had never made a Potions mistake in seventeen years, twenty-four if you counted his school days.  The likelihood that he would commit his first error on Harry Potter by pure coincidence was utterly preposterous.  If what had happened to Harry had been wrought by his hand, then it had been done with full and willful cognizance.  And if that were true, then it was her fervent wish that the Dementors killed him slowly and with ghoulish relish.

     _If he really was responsible, he'll never make it that far.  Sirius will kill him with his bare hands and consider it a worthy accomplishment_.

     So would she for that matter.  Hogwarts had already lost so many of its best in this senseless war of subterfuge against the Dark Lord.  Poor Cedric Diggory had been the most public casualty, but he was far from the first.  Over the past twenty years, pupils from the most outspoken families who opposed Voldemort had disappeared, simply boarded the train at the end of a term and never come back.  Some of the disappearances could no doubt be attributed to the benign circumstances of withdrawal or transfer, but no such papers had ever crossed her desk.  They were simply gone with no explanation.

     About some of the pupils, there could be no doubt, even if the Ministry claimed otherwise.  You could find answers if you knew where to look.  They weren't pleasant answers, mind, only true.  They were in the seedy, pernicious gossip of the dilapidated pubs frequented by harlots, tosspots, and other beaten down chaff of society, and in the less reputable publications like _The Quibbler_, an outlandish tabloid to which she and the other professors had been secretly subscribed for years.  It was filled with various and sundry drek, but in the morass of nonsense articles about Horned Grindypunks and One-Eyed Hooverhumps that went on a rampage and laid waste to entire isolated villages never named, there could be found rancid kernels of sad truth.  Like the story of Herakles Duquesne.

     It wasn't a story you could find readily; the _Daily Prophet_ had refused to cover it.  Too monstrous for their readership, too evocative of the days when the Death Eaters had walked the streets freely espousing their loyalty to Voldemort and promising death and fearful retribution to those strong or brave enough to stand against them.  Those were memories the people wished to forget, and so the fate of young Herakles was swept under the rug, left for the more salacious, less prestigious, lesser circulated papers, the bare pickings of carrion left behind after the lions had their fill.  Not many people knew the story, not many, but enough.

     Herakles had been a sturdy, earnest boy with an open, bovine face when he entered his first year at Hogwarts ten years ago.  In quieter, more thoughtful reflection, she often thought he had been a bit touched in the head, but whatever he was, he had been a sweet boy, always willing to help and eager to complete his lessons.  Unsurprisingly, he had been Sorted into Hufflepuff.  Pomona Sprout had taken quite a liking to the boy, and for two happy years, he had flourished.

     At the beginning of what should have been his third year, he had failed to step off the school train.  As was the custom, a letter of inquiry had been owled to his parents asking if anything were amiss.  Two weeks went by, then three, and they received no word from the Duquesnes, which was strange because they were much like their son, open, honest, salt-of-the-earth souls who had never left school correspondence unanswered.  The alarm bells had begun to sound, then, muffled but terribly insistent.  Most of the professors had known then that he was gone, but they had clung to the guttering embers all the same, especially Pomona, who retreated each day to her greenhouses and offered up prayers and incense to Demeter for his safe return.

     When, after six weeks, nothing had been heard, the Ministry was contacted.  Fudge, in his usual supercilious fashion, pooh-poohed their uneasiness, but at Albus' insistence, they were referred to the Magical Law Enforcement's Missing Wizards Division.  Two patrol wizards were dispatched to the Duquesne house, where they found the door ajar and flapping forlornly in the late fall breeze.  There was no sign of the Duquesnes.  Their clothes were hung neatly in their wardrobes, and there were still dishes in the sink, winking in the sunlight streaming through the half-open window.  Nothing else was out of place.  No overturned chairs, no broken glass, no signs of struggle.  With nothing else to go on, Fudge deemed the matter out of Ministry hands and let it drop.  

     In January, five months after Herakles vanished, a washerwoman ran to a pub in Ottery St. Catchpole, incoherent and gibbering, drying spittle on her chin.  After much soothing and a liberal application of Ogden's Old Firewhiskey, most of the tale was got out of her.  She had been walking from her cottage to the market, she told her rapt audience, when she was overcome with the urge to go to the bathroom.  The journey from where she lived to the market was a long one, particularly for a woman of nearly ninety, and she was certain she would never make it to either destination.  

     She had continued on for a while, reluctant to have to go hunting for a secluded spot.  Eventually, though, the strident demands of her bladder overrode her sense of propriety and the throbbing protests of her arthritic knees, and she had hobbled off the rutted path in search of a suitable hillock.  It was then that she saw it.

     It had taken several more shots for her to say what "it" was, but between her strangled sobs and dark mutterings, it became clear that "it" was a body.  She told them it was lying in the tall, rank weeds, moldering and festering.  It was mostly a skeleton, she said, a pile of bones wrapped in rotting robes.  Then she fainted dead away and had to be carried to the storeroom until a Mediwizard arrived through the Floo network.

     Some of the lurid details of the shocking revelation had undoubtedly been liberally garnished by the paper, but the bare bones, if the pun could be excused, were beyond dispute.  Once the Mediwizard had arrived and taken charge of the hysterical woman, a small group of intrepid, adventurous wizards set off to prove her story.  They were gone roughly an hour, and when they returned, they were considerably quieter than when they departed.  The younger wizards lurched silently toward the bar and promptly ordered double Fizzing Firewaters, which they quaffed without a word.  Their older counterparts, no less shocked but better prepared, fumbled in their robes for trusty hip flasks.  

     It was much as the old woman had said, or so the men told the officials from the Magical Law Enforcement Squad.  Two of the sturdier fellows led them to the find, and the body was taken to the Ministry for closer examination.  Through the back entrance, of course, away from prying eyes.  It was taken to the Department of Mysteries and to the morgue ensconced within its winding, secretive walls.

     After an examination, the body was identified as that of Herakles Duquesne, a pronouncement that surprised no one.  Pomona was devastated, and for three days afterward, her normally sweet disposition had been doleful and irritable.  The cause of death was listed as indeterminate, though the attendant Mediwizard conceded that death by murder was a more than probable possibility.  Herakles was buried in a pauper's grave upon completion of the enquiry, and the Ministry deemed the investigation closed.

     That was the end of the official explanation, but such mysterious stories tended to acquire a life of their own, and feverish, salacious details of the gruesome discovery circulated through the noisome, lush grapevine of rundown gin mills and flophouses.  Some of the men in the party that had discovered the body were only too eager to recount what they had seen, particularly if plied with liquor and a few well-placed Galleons.  

     Most of the things they said and which the papers printed verbatim were little more than drunken ravings, but amid the whiskey-soaked dross were bits of actual fact.  She knew this because whether Cornelius Fudge liked it or not, Albus could get the information he wanted.  He had gone to the Ministry one morning and returned with a dossier the breadth of his arm, a dossier marked _Duquesne_.  He had also, she remembered now as she worked her needles into the yarn, been wearing an expression of sedate achievement.

     The file had been horrible in its detached description of what had become of the quiet, sweet-natured boy that had once been Herakles Duquesne.  Several times during the reading, she had to get up and leave, unable to cope with the bloodless catalogue of the atrocities performed upon an innocent.  There had been acts of cold depravity perpetrated upon his small form, but they had been wrought with such malevolent sanity that she had shuddered, wrapped her arms about her chest and shuddered, her teeth chattering in spite of the roaring fire.  The bastards, whoever they had been, had stooped to the despicable low of actually using Muggle weapons on him.  There was no greater barbarity.

     The death of Herakles Duquesne had been eight years ago.  Why she was thinking about it now, in the expansive darkness of the infirmary she could not say.  She supposed it was because Harry's illness had been just as sudden and just as strange, a reminder that bad things were still possible, even in a safe place like Hogwarts.  Maybe it was because he, too, had been felled when they least expected it.  

     _It's because you know in your heart what happened to him, _who_ happened.  The Ministry can deny it all they wish, but it is a sure bet that Death Eaters tore that boy apart.  There were signs even then that they were reorganizing, reforming their ranks, winnowing further and deeper into the daily fabric of this world.  Everyone knew it, but we refusde to acknowledge it, turned our faces from the looming, coiling shadows and bid them depart, leave in peace the skies that had so recently seen the return of the sun.  We knew and did nothing, and now our inertia has come home to roost._

_     Severus is no longer a Death Eater.  He hasn't been in seventeen years._

That was only a theory.  Albus could prate all he liked about Severus changing his ways and embracing the righteous path, but he had no signs of actually doing so, not that she could see.  He still attended those abominable meetings, still made obeisance to those cursed feet, and try as she might, she simply could not believe that his loyalty was mere lip service.  It had been ingrained in him for too long, and he loved cruelty too much.

     _For all I know, he could have had something to do with young Herakles' demise._

     In truth, she had wondered about that for a very long time.  Over the years she had suppressed the thought as traitorous to Albus, but now, alone in the dark with no one to censure her, she let it breathe.  Severus certainly had the knowledge, opportunity, and motive.  He knew who opposed the Dark Lord and who supported him.  Herakles' murder had occurred just before the start of term, and even if it hadn't, he still had ample time to be about at night on supposed Order business.  And he had admitted on several occasions that he had little aversion to killing.

     _Do you truly think Albus would harbor a man who murdered one of his students?_

She wished with all her heart that it was not so, but she had known him for sixty years, seen him wage his calculated, crushing campaign against Grindewald, and she knew that he would if he thought the ends justified the means.  Sacrifice one life to spare ten thousand more.  And she suspected that were Severus standing before him in blood-drenched robes, Albus would cling to his blindness, swaddle himself in it.  He would never admit that his greatest pet project could not be saved.

     He had had a habit of such projects.  Most of them were harmless.  Hagrid, for all his fearsome appearance, was as docile as a lamb.  Then there was Sybil Trelawney, the unfortunate, impotent descendant of the most celebrated Seer of their time; the dithering wretch couldn't predict what she'd have for breakfast even if it were sitting in front of her, and yet Albus kept her on out of sentiment.  He also claimed that she'd made an accurate prediction a time or two, though McGonagall was of the opinion that a hallucinating monkey could have the same luck.

     But Severus was different.  He had been one of _them,_ one of the black-hearted, soulless monsters that had infected their once peaceful world with a stomach-knotting dread that brought acrid bile to every throat.  He had skulked in the abetting darkness and stolen children from their beds, stained his careful, immaculate hands with innocent blood, wrested life and love from a thousand shattered hearts.  What redemption was there for him?  He could not breathe life into the dead, could not refashion the glimmering, fractured shards of hearts long-stilled.  The only reparation for the things he had done was the forfeiture of his own misspent life.  He was not a cheerful, bumbling inept like Hagrid, nor a cantankerous belligerent like Alastor Moody, who, in spite of his faults and his taciturn disposition, had spent each and every one of his years doing what was right.  He was as sleek and dangerous as a cobra, and whatever notions Albus might hold to the contrary, venom still coursed through his needlepoint fangs.

     Maybe that was part of the challenge for him, to tame the savage beast, force the serpent to lick sugar from the palm of his outstretched hand with its forked tongue.  If he turned Severus to the Light, he could hold him forth as the ultimate victory, taunt Voldemort with irrefutable proof that his hold of the souls of men was neither absolute nor eternal.  He would have plucked a life from beneath his very nose and escaped unscathed.

     _Pride goeth before a fall._  That Muggle religious book was full of pithy aphorisms like that, and it was another in which she firmly believed.  Not that it was easy to accuse Albus of pride; his arrogance was of a humbler ilk.  He never flouted his power or his authority, but he was always keenly aware of them.  His self-confidence was an accent to, not a centerpiece of, his personality.  She had never seen him succumb to it, but Severus was the closest she had ever seen him come.  Where he was concerned, she feared for his judgment.

     _His judgment is far from perfect of late.  An impostor Moody fooled him for an entire year._

     He had a great deal on his mind-The Tri-wizard Tournament, practicing honey diplomacy with Karkaroff and that elitist French blowhard Madame Maxime, safeguarding against sabotage…

_     And we saw how well that went.  He and Moody have been friends for at least fifty years.  He should have known.  Ten years ago, he _would _have._

Well, what was there to be done for it?  He was old; there was no getting around it.  Things were bound to slip when you were well into the twilight past one hundred and fifty.  Most people his age were lucky to recognize their morning porridge.  That he was still up and vital and the critical component in the fight against Voldemort was nothing short of miraculous.  She had trusted him this far, and she would simply have to trust him now.

     _What if your blind trust leads you all to ruin?  Blind trust.  Isn't that what Voldemort requires?_

She cursed softly as the needle sank into the pad of her thumb again.  Fat, glistening droplets of blood dripped onto the mass of knitted yarn bunched on her lap.  She must be tired if she was equating Albus to Voldemort.  The two were nothing alike.  She really ought to get some sleep.  It wouldn't do for her to be nodding off during lessons.  Longbottom could put someone's eye out with his wand if she weren't watching.  There was nothing more she could do here tonight.  She stood, and the wad of shapeless yarn fell to the floor.  She stared at it through blurring eyes, then slowly bent and picked it up, wadding it into a rumpled lump.  She would throw it away when she got to her chambers.  It was useless now.  She couldn't give it to anyone.  Things onto which uneasy blood had been shed were cursed.  She left the room on brittle knees, stooped and shambling from her long sit.  The trip to her chambers took twice as long as usual, and when she climbed beneath her woolen coverlet, it did nothing to keep out the cutting chill.  She shivered and did not sleep.

     While his colleague tossed and turned in her bed, the Headmaster sat in his office, his feet extended before him.  The jaunty pink ears of the bunny slippers that shod them flopped roguishly, but try as he might, he could draw no mirth from them.  Not even the memory of his late wife, who had given them to him as a playful present sixty years ago could warm him now.  The chill that dampened his bones had little to do with the temperature in the room.  Even if it had, the grate of the office's fireplace was currently occupied with the wan, sleep-puffed face of Arthur Weasley.

     "When?" Arthur asked, absently pushing the tail of his sleeping cap out of his face.  His voice was gravelly and dazed.

     "During his Potions lesson this afternoon.  Professor Snape gave him the Advanced Sleeping Draught Harry had brewed the week before.  A moment later, he collapsed.  He has yet to regain consciousness."  

     Arthur absorbed this in disbelieving silence, his normally pale face paler still, and then he said softly, "Any idea what has happened?"

     "Professor Snape came to me earlier this evening and informed me that cyanide from his toxins stores was missing, but we are not yet certain it was the culprit.  Confirmation will have to wait until morning."

     Arthur pulled off his sleeping cap and ran his fingers through the short wisps of his rapidly thinning hair.  "Tomorrow?  Why not tonight?  Harry needs help now," he exclaimed.

     Dumbledore understood his agitation all too well.  Harry was like another son to him and Molly, and he, Dumbledore had always been grateful for their instant and whole-hearted inclusion of Harry into their family.  It had given him a feeling of stability and belonging, something that had been severely lacking in the boy's life.  The Weasleys had become his de facto family.

     _The horrendous lack of stability was entirely your fault, if I recall._

_     Yes, it was.  But at the time, I thought it more important to protect his physical safety.  His psychological growth was of secondary concern._

_     A sentiment I'm sure young Harry would appreciate._

The list of his mistakes was long, and in the past twelve hours it had grown longer still, but now was not the time to enumerate them all.  He raised a placatory hand.  "I understand your worry, Arthur, Merlin knows I do, but we must remain calm.  I ordered Madam Pomfrey to bed; erroneous information in this case would be far worse than no information at all."

     Arthur sighed, and his fidgeting fingers harrowed his hair again.  "You're right, Headmaster.  As usual.  It's just-,"  He gestured helplessly with one arm.

     "It's Harry," Dumbledore finished for him.

     After a pause, Arthur nodded.  "Yes."  He sounded almost ashamed.  There was a contemplative silence, and then, "Who could have done it?"  Plaintive.

     "Professor Snape is at a loss.  He assures me that no one could have tampered with those stores without his knowledge."

     Arthur's jaw tightened, and Dumbledore sensed he wanted to ask a question, _the _question, but after a moment's hesitation, he simply said, "What would you like me to do?"

     Dumbledore's shoulders sagged.  _Thank Merlin for the Weasley tact._  If Arthur had asked the other question, he would not have been able to answer it, not without a great deal of reservation.  "Call the Order for a meeting tomorrow night.  They have a right to know.  Seven o' clock.  The usual place."

     "Right."  Arthur scratched the bridge of his nose, suddenly uncomfortable.  "Headmaster," he said slowly, "is _everyone_ to be included?  Even Sirius Black?"

     Dumbledore started.  Circe in a girdle!  In his exhaustion, he had forgotten about Sirius.  That would have been a pretty thing.  Even in the best of circumstances, Severus and Sirius loathed one another; if he suspected Severus of poisoning his godson, he would tear him apart with his bare hands and perhaps even his teeth, Dumbledore, propriety, and the greater cause be damned.  Arthur's quick thinking had averted disaster.

     _You should have gone to sleep._

_     Maybe it's more than lack of sleep that is clouding your mind._

That thought had occurred to him with alarming frequency over the last few years, and with Harry lying comatose beneath his feet, it suddenly had a terrible piquancy.  He shook himself from the melancholy it imbued in him and forced himself to speak with an authority he did not feel.  "No, I don't think that would be wise.  Get the Arcanus Room ready."

     "Right.  An awkward pause.  "I'll see you tonight, then, sir."

     Dumbledore nodded curtly, and Arthur's head vanished, leaving only the faint afterimage of green flame.  Then that, too, was gone, and he was alone with a dozing Fawkes and his troubled thoughts.  Slowly, painfully, he rose from his chair and headed for the Hospital Wing to filch some Medi-Chocolate and Pepper-up Potion.  He was going to need much of both to get through this day. 

       

                


	25. The War Room

Chapter Twenty-Five

     A mile behind him, the bright lights of King's Cross Station pierced the darkness, pointing the way for weary Muggle commuters as they trudged toward the car park and the fantastical contraptions they used to transport themselves to and fro, but ahead of him there was only darkness and the vague, shadowy outline of the privet hedges.  The steady clack of his boots on the pavement was sharp and crisp in the cool night air.

     He was grateful for the uniform, encompassing darkness that seemed a singular invention of Great Britain.  It hid him well.  In his robes and heavy traveling cloak, he was all but invisible.  Only his face, white and gaunt, could be seen, jutting out of the blackness like an unexpected moon.  He could have Apparated directly to the doorstep of 12 Grimmauld place, but he had decided to walk from King's Cross instead.  It would give him time to think, to clear his head of the mad jumble of thoughts that had been plaguing him for days.  He was bracing himself.

     The walk hadn't been too bad, actually.  Most decent Muggles were long home, hunkered behind the closed curtains of their drab little houses, reading the newspaper and trying to shut out the incessant nagging of their wives.  Those left on the streets at nightfall were either philandering husbands too wrapped in the promise of illicit fruit to pay him any mind, or drug-ravaged miscreants whose attire made his look positively innocuous.  In truth, he was still pondering the youth he'd seen with incandescent pink hair in the fashion of the crest atop a Trojan soldier's helmet and a bolt through his nose.  For one stupefied instant, he'd thought he was looking at Nymphadora Tonks in one of her improbable guises, but then he'd drawn closer and seen the unfocused glaze in the young man's eyes.  The things Muggles did to themselves.

     No one had bothered him, though a dirty child in scruffy trainers and a filthy shirt had crowed at him that if he was looking for the _Mayflower_, he'd only missed it by a few centuries.  He had passed the boy without a word, slipping his hand into the pocket of his trousers to clutch his wand with a white-knuckled grip and reminding himself that hexing the miserable brat would bring sanctions from the Ministry and disappoint Albus still further.

     _Merlin knows you haven't done enough of _that.He snorted and quickened his pace, tugging his cloak more closely around his throat.  The nights were chill now; soon they would be cold, cold enough to make your chest ache, and snow would blanket the ground in a glowing white shroud.  Tonight, it was just cold enough to make his breath plume like lazily drifting steam.  When he left later, there would be a thick, rolling tide of fog slithering through the skeletal hedges like a nebulous white serpent and coiling possessively around the bland facades of the houses.

     It was just half-past six.  He wasn't expected at the meeting for another half hour, but he wanted to talk to Albus, offer up an explanation if he could.  He deserved one.  Everyone else could toss off; he owed them nothing.  Despite what they told themselves over pints in pubs, he didn't work for the Order.  He wasn't their lapdog, to be ordered about as they pleased.  The only reason he submitted to their whims is because Albus asked it of him.

     Albus _was_ the Order.  He could wax all he liked about cooperation, bravery, mutual sacrifice, and all of that sentimental pap, but he was their heart.  Without him, they were nothing.  The cohesive front they currently presented would disintegrate into a babel of internecine squabbling as those unaccustomed to the mantle of leadership fought over who would wear it.  Had it not been for him and his ages of calm wisdom, the Potter brat wouldn't have made it as far as he had.

     Number 12 Grimmauld Place loomed suddenly out of the darkness, its grim visage even uglier in the absence of light.  He sneered at the ominous black door that yawned at him, but he did not enter it.  Instead, he continued around the side of the house until he reached an ungainly snarl of brambles and thorn bushes.  Black's great-grandfather, Andromedus, had planted them as a frighteningly effective anti-prowling device two hundred years before.  Then, when the grounds had been reasonably well-maintained by industrious and properly terrified house elves, they had been a savagely beautiful deterrent.  Now, with the half-mad Kreatcher as the sole means of upkeep, they were a lethal menace.

     He squatted in front of them, rolling up the sleeves of his robes so they wouldn't snag in the hectic tangle of vicious thorns, some an inch and a half long, with ends that dripped condensation like venom.  He cursed the Headmaster for the thousandth time for accepting Black's offer to use his ancestral home as Order headquarters.  No matter how much care he took, he was going to be scratched to bits by the time he reached the Arcanus Room.

     "Damn you, Black," he spat, and pulled his wand from the inside pocket of his robes.

     He pointed it at the bushes, and as his left arm extended, he saw the unmistakable mark that had set his feet upon this path.  The pinprick eyes of the serpent looked impassively up at him, and in the nascent, shifting light, the grinning skull seemed to leer at him.  It had been a long time since he had studied the Dark Mark he had once worn so willingly, and it disgusted him.  Thick bile rose in his suddenly greasy throat, and he spat to rid his mouth of the taste of bitter contrition.  He jerked the sleeve of his robe down his forearm, hiding his secret once more.  It no longer mattered if his robes tore. 

     "Damn you, Black," he repeated, as though his nemesis were responsible for the shameful brand.  "_Diffendo!"_ he murmured.

     A thin beam of purple light shot from the tip of his wand and sheared the heart of the clotted brambles.  The two halves fell in opposite directions, revealing a neat square stain.  He swore under his breath and groped into the center of the square until his fingers closed around the shape of a heavy iron handle.  To his eyes, it looked as though his fingers had been devoured by the masonry.  The placement of the Invisibility Charm was seamless.

     _If Lord Voldemort is to be believed, this should hardly come as a surprise.  Old Andromedus was a clever bastard.  And damned dangerous.  One of Grindewald's favorites._

_     Whatever he was_, _he's moldering in his tomb and of no consequence to you.  It would be prudent to get through the door before the trap resets itself, and Sirius finds you in the morning, impaled on the thorns like some morbid lolly._

_     Probably have me mounted on the wall beside the wrinkled heads of the Black family house elves.  Nothing like seeing the severed head of your enemy to stimulate the appetite._

    The idea of Black smiling and whistling a merry tune as he sauntered down the staircase past his glass-eyed, forever staring face spurred him into action.  There was no way he was going to allow Black the satisfaction of standing over his mangled corpse and cackling while the rest of the Order extricated his lifeless body from the tenacious grip of the thorn bushes.  His life had been a shambles.  His death, at least, should have some pitiful fragment of dignity.

     He tugged the unseen handle, grunting with the exertion, fine beads of sweat misting on his upper lip.  His shoulders and bicep thrummed with energy, a sensation he paused to savor.  Potions was exact science, not brute force, and he seldom had the opportunity to stretch, to test the limits of his body.  As a boy, he'd loved Quidditch; he'd been abysmal at it, but he'd enjoyed it.  He had been out, free.  It was one of the rare occasions when the sun had been permitted to kiss his face, to warm it with its maternal caress.  Then James Potter had come along in his entitled arrogance and soured that love, curdled it with his swagger and his ridicule.  Yet another sin to lay at clay Potter feet.

     He tugged harder, gritting his teeth with the effort, and a crack formed in the smooth square, widening slowly, the blackness spreading like blight.  The hidden hinges of the square gave a grating groan, and he froze, ears straining for the sound of the front door opening, for the stealthy hiss of approaching footsteps.  He doubted Sirius could hear him from inside the manor, but he wasn't taking any chances.

     _Assuming Black is even in the house.  He could be out._

_     Albus ordered him to remain inside._

_     Since when has he listened either to instruction or reason?  Intractable prat._

The thought that he might be in the chill London air with his arse in the air and poised precariously between lethal thorn bushes for nothing infuriated him, and he jerked the heavy door open with an impatient snort.  His arm gave a warning twang, and he knew he would pay for his rash insouciance in the morning.  He shoved the thought out of his mind and crawled into the claustrophobic darkness.

     The smells of damp earth and wet stone struck his nostrils, and the ghostly, unseen fingers of dainty cobwebs brushed his nose and cheek.  He sniffed and brushed them away, pulling his legs in after him.  Just in time, as it turned out.  Behind him, the brambles and thorn bushes snapped closed with a voracious, defeated crack.  A moment later, the heavy door crashed shut, throttling the fresh air and faint light that had tried to dislodge the fetor of decades, perhaps centuries.

     "_Lumos!"_  From beneath his hand, a faint green light speared the shadows.

     The beam was narrow, barely illuminating the span of his wrist, and by it, he could see less than a foot in front of his face.  He inched along, taking shallow breaths of the stale, close air and grimacing at the gritty feel of dust beneath his palms.  Among other things.  Rats probably flourished here, and it was discomfiting to think that their petrified offal was accruing beneath his nails.  Contrary to popular belief, he was a fastidious man.

     His shoulders scraped the pocked walls, and he cursed the name of Black again, not just Sirius, but the whole lot of them.  Insanity ran in the family; it was as much a Black birthright as this twisted, sprawling manse, and only minds as poisoned and diseased as theirs could have envisioned this place, with all its secret passages and hidden claves.  The fact that the Black family had a connection, however tenuous, with the Potters was more proof that the Fates lived to torment him.

     _Why Black?  Of all the people Saint James could have chosen to be Harry's godfather, why did it have to be Black?_

A better question was why did Black have to be a member of the Order at all?  He had no place, and aside from the use of this rotting estate, was of no practical value.  He was a liability.  Hot-tempered and wildly irrational, leaping to preposterous conclusions in a single bound.  And a wanted fugitive.  Nonetheless, Albus kept him on, insisting that he was a vital part of the resistance.  

     Part of his stubbornness on the issue of Black and his utility to the cause, stemmed, no doubt, from his sense of responsibility over the deaths of James and Lily.  He never said so, but Snape knew he blamed himself.  He was so sure he could have, should have done something more.  In that, he and young Potter were of a single mind.  They both staggered beneath the unimaginable weight of self-imposed Gryffindor nobility.

     Well, it was ridiculous.  James had gotten himself blown up, and he had taken his wife with him.  He had known the risks of the path he had chosen, or he had, at the least, acted as though he had, and in the end, he had paid the consequence.  Lily, in yoking herself to him, had chosen the same fate.  There was nothing to be done for it, and all of this teeth-gnashing and self-flagellation was utterly senseless.

     The ground sloped downward beneath his hands and knees, and the smell of damp earth grew stronger.  Soon, he would be able to stand, and for that he was grateful.  Tiny, cold paws skittered across his wand hand, and he recoiled, his lip curling in disgust.  He hated this passageway, hated the Arcanus Room.  If it weren't for Black, skulking about like thieves in the night would have been unnecessary.  They could have met in one of the drafty, mildewed sitting rooms; he could have been pilloried in relative comfort. 

     In truth, the Black manor made his skin crawl.  He never stayed in it any longer than he had to, fleeing as soon as escape presented itself.  The other members of the Order slept here, even took meals here upon occasion, and it boggled his mind.  He couldn't.  He wouldn't.  This place was tainted, and it corrupted everything it touched.  It was a fundamentally _bad_ place, nursing centuries of malevolence in its slowly crumbling walls.  Being inside it was like being trapped in the tumorous belly of an ancient and terrible beast, and as he squirmed torturously through its narrow lower intestine, he thought only of flight, of the hour when he would be vomited back onto the pavement and he could retreat to the blessed sanctuary of Hogwarts and its stalwart walls that repelled the darkness.

     Suddenly, the uniform darkness was pierced by the sickly orange glow of flickering torches.  He let out a soft sigh of relief.  Albus _had_ come this way, then.  "_Nox!"_  The light at the tip of his wand winked out, and he tucked it inside his robes.

     He carefully navigated the six-inch drop that marked the end of the sloping passageway, his hand coming to rest in a soft dune of dust scant inches from a fat brown spider.  The spider seemed unperturbed by his intrusion into its world, surveying him sedately from eight inscrutable green eyes.  Its legs shifted, but it did not flee.  He stared at it, taken aback by its frank appraisal.  After a moment, it retreated, scuttling up the dank wall, its legs clittering drily over the moss-covered stone wall.

     The sound unnerved him.  It struck a chord of dreadful familiarity within him, and a frigid chill crept up his spine.  He remembered it from somewhere.  

     _A spider from your own dungeon?_

     No.  Nothing so mundane.  His dungeon had been home to hundreds, if not thousands, of spiders over the years, and he had grown quite accustomed to the light, furtive skittering of their brittle legs.  In fact, he had come to associate that sound with security, embraced it as a sign of the peaceful status quo.  This was nothing of the sort.  It was like being touched by corpse flesh, and he would be thankful if he never heard it again.

     _You will._

     The bald certainty in the thought made him pause in the middle of getting to his feet.  He crouched, knees and back bent, fingers of his right hand tented in the thick layer of dirt, head bowed.  It was a strangely reverent attitude, and in the dim, washed-out light of the torches, he seemed to be making obeisance to the spider as it haunched in the center of its web.  One heartbeat.  Another.  He slowly rose to his feet, absently dusting off the knees of his robes.

     He crossed the tiny room and began the cramped descent down a long spiral of stone steps.  The closer he drew to the Arcanus Room, the more uneasy he became.  He had never been inside it before, though he knew very well what it was.  So did Albus, and he wondered why the Headmaster had chosen it as the war room this time around.  Perhaps he thought he, Snape, would draw comfort from familiar surroundings.  If so, the man was going to be sorely disappointed.

     The Arcanus Room was the first room built after the foundation had set, an enormous cavern entrenched seventy feet below the earth.  It had served many purposes over the years, if the gabblings of Bellatrix LeStrange were to be believed.  In the days of her great-great-grandfather, when the family's power and prestige had been at its peak, it had been a grand ballroom, a haven where the Blacks could consort as they pleased with whomever or whatever struck their fancy.  Bellatrix never wearied of regaling him or anyone else who would listen with tales of the mad orgies to which the walls had borne witness.

     When the family fortune began to decline, the raucous revelry of the orgies fell silent, and it wasn't long before the walls became sentinels of something else entirely.  Privileged wizards did not surrender power willingly, and the family madness led them down avenues no one else would have dared tread, thoroughfares that had never seen the light of any sun, nor even the jaundiced light of Hell's flame.  In the weeks and days before Grindewald was toppled from the bloody parapet of his fortress by the searing sting of a white bumblebee, people disappeared, scores of them.  Men, women, and children vanished as quickly and quietly as wisps of woodsmoke.  Aurors and regular citizens sifted through the smoldering ruins and blasted corpses strewn across battlefields and stuffed into mass graves searching for the lost, but no trace of them was ever found.

     Until Aurors came for Bellatrix's father, that was.  Ministry Charm Breakers and Dark Arts Detectors scoured the house, and one of them discovered the passageway through which he was now moving.  Unfortunately for him, he also found what lay at the end of it.  If he had known what he was walking into, he might have turned around and left the secret to slumber, but he was ignorant and eager to seize whatever indictment he could against the Ancient and Noble House of Black.  In the latter, he was successful beyond his wildest dreams, though his dreams were forever cursed.

     When the Auror opened the door to the Arcanus Room, it must have seemed as though he had tumbled headlong into the foul black waters of the river Styx.  Newspaper accounts of the time all agree on one thing.  Shortly after disappearing down this godforsaken corridor, he returned, screaming at the top of his voice.  He lurched past his gobsmacked colleagues, wrenched open the heavy black front door, vomited noisily on the front steps, and collapsed.  He took early retirement the next day at the ripe old age of thirty-nine.

     One hundred and ninety-six bodies were removed from the Arcanus Room over the next three days.  House elves had to be called in to complement the exhausted and appalled Aurors as they hauled out litter after litter and bin bag after bin bag of human remains.  The house was silent, save for the groans and prayers of the workers and the sounds of retching when they could take no more.  The Black patriarch had only smiled when the revolted Aurors led him away.  His silence remained unbroken until he received the Kiss eight weeks later.

     The rest of the Blacks were left to their own, abandoned to the merciless influence of the house and the incessant whispers of contagious lunacy.  There wasn't enough evidence to do anything else, though everyone knew that Madame Black and her twisted daughters and sons had been involved as surely as they drew breath.  After a while, the horrified gossiped had tapered away, turning to juicier fare, and the once prestigious name of Black became an epithet.  The widow and her children withdrew into their insular world, cocooned themselves inside the blackened heart of Grimmauld Place and surrendered to its siren song.  The Arcanus Room became the family crypt.

     The stone stairs ended, giving way to a narrow corridor.  At the far end, the heavy iron door of the Arcanus Room waited, blackened with age and its own malice.  He slowed his pace, stepping gingerly over the desiccated bodies of mice.  He was in no hurry to reach that room, even if Albus was there.  He, a creature of rationality and reason, who had spent his entire life compiling measures and angles and calculated the risk to his survival to the last cold degree, was afraid of it, afraid of the whole damn house, and the fear weighted down his feet, contravened his incontrovertible will.  

     He knew Black was somewhere above his head, and he sent a thousand hexes toward him on every breath, heaved them upward with each leaden footstep.  That he should be drawing nearer that damnable door while Black whiled away the minutes and hours in the fading comfort of a ragged parlor seemed an unpardonable sin.  This trek was only needed _because_ of Black and his hereditary madness.  _He_ should be here now, swallowing his own sour spit and trying to calm a bladder suddenly two sizes too small.  Hell, had the Fates any sense of justice, he would have made this journey long ago, in an oblong box borne upon the shoulders of his kin.

     _Not likely.  Even if there were many of them left._

     He snorted.  Juno Black would have been flayed alive rather than allow her prodigal son burial in the family crypt.  She had disowned him when it became apparent he did not share their pathological loathing for Muggles and Mudbloods.  Burned him right off the family tapestry, as if obliteration of his name from the soiled, tatty fabric would erase his very existence.  For her, it had.  Nothing beyond the walls of this house was real to her in the end.

     Regulus _was _buried here, entombed beside his father.  Regulus, with views more virulent and radical than those held by the Malfoys, a sycophant fanatic who had believed too ardently, been too loyal.  The Dark Lord had used him for his ends, and when his part was finished, he had killed him with a casual flick of his wrist.  Regulus had professed his allegiance unto the end, his last words of devotion tumbling from his lips even as his eyes began to fade and glaze.

     The death of Regulus had been the death of Juno, though she drew breath for five years more.  She had been inconsolable during the funeral, ranting and raving, not against the cold savagery of Voldemort, but against Sirius, whom she believed to have framed Regulus for some crime against her Lord.  The blatant illogic of her accusation was of no consequence, and she had trumpeted it all through the service.  It had gotten so shrill and grating that, Snape, acting as a pallbearer, had needed all of his will to refrain from casting a Silencing Charm.  Lucius, unencumbered by such trivialities as tact, had finally done it for him, and for a brief moment, he had remembered why he had once been drawn to him.

     _Yet another reason to thank Albus for my chance at redemption.  Being a pallbearer for people who make my stomach turn._

     _Those in need of redemption cannot choose the path by which they reach it._

_     No need to proselytize, Albus._

     He stopped and took a deep breath.  He was in front of the massive iron door.  All that remained was to open it and step inside.  Except he didn't want to touch the door.  There was nothing wrong with it-no Curses or traps lurked beneath its disused exterior.  All the same, his hand absolutely refused to reach for the door handle.  

     _If I touch it, I'll be contaminated, _he thought.__

_     Don't be absurd.  It's a door handle.  Nothing more.  Besides, if that's true, you're done for already.  You've touched the floor half a dozen times._

_     Yes, but the dust protected me, _he countered nonsensically.

     _Really, Severus, get a hold of yourself.  What would your pupils think if they could see you now, the draconian teacher of their darkest nightmares, cowering before an ordinary door and pinning his faith on dust and calcified rat shit?  Albus is in there, and if an old man of one hundred and fifty can make the trip without coming undone, so can you._

     The voice was right, of course.  He was being perfectly ridiculous.  He grunted in exasperation, seized the door handle, yanked it open, and stepped inside before his nerves could fail him.

     Albus sat in the middle of the room, hands folded placidly across his stomach, spectacles sliding precariously on the edge of his nose, feet stretched out in front of him.  He smiled knowingly.  "Ah, there you are.  Bit later than I expected."

     "I don't like this house," he snapped by way of explanation, stalking over to the spindle-legged chair on the Headmaster's left.  He sat stiffly, sneering when the chair emitted an unbecoming creak.

     "Not terribly sturdy, I'm afraid," Albus said ruefully, stroking his beard thoughtfully.  "Kreatcher rounded them up.  What you see here is the best of the lot."  He gestured at the semicircle of chairs, several of which sported warped or splintered legs.  One was missing a leg entirely, leaning drunkenly against the wall.

     "I see you've found a seat for Moody," he said, eyeing the derelict chair.

     "It was a chore finding seats for everyone," Albus replied, clearly choosing to ignore his barb.

     "The whole estate should be burned to the ground, and the ground seeded with salt," he muttered irritably.

     "Oh, I don't know.  Sirius came out of it all right."

     "My point exactly."

     "Given the circumstances, Severus, don't you think it time to put aside petty childhood grievances?"

     "I'll thank you not to patronize me, Headmaster," he snapped, anger at Black rising anew.  He pulled a handkerchief from the folds of his robes and began to swipe at the grime on his hands.  "A petty childhood grievance is precisely why we are in the Arcanus Room at all."

     Albus sighed and pushed his spectacles back onto the bridge of his nose.  "Severus, please.  Despite what you think, Sirius is a good man.  He simply has a blind spot when it comes to Harry.  He shouldn't be damned for past mistakes."

     "He'll be quite happy to damn me for mine," Snape pointed out.  "Bloody hell!" he spat.  The handkerchief was utterly useless.  The more he scrubbed, the more dirt caked beneath the crescents of his fingernails.  He crumpled it and tossed it to the ground with a defeated sigh.

     "_Scourgify!_"   

     He looked up to see Albus calmly putting his wand away and reaching for the dishonored linen.  He plucked it from the floor with his long fingers and folded it neatly into a crisp square.  He held it out with a small smile.

     "I believe this is yours," he said gently.

     Snape stared at him, torn between a spate of unhinged laughter and a string of venomous oaths.  In the end, he chose neither, opting instead to look down at his now clean hands.  How could he have been so thick?  A Cleansing Charm.  He had used it a thousand times, and twenty-two years ago, one James Potter had used it to great efficacy on his choking, gagging mouth.  How could he have forgotten?  He was losing his mind.  The father had stolen his dignity, and now the son was shearing away his sanity.  He covered his face with his hands and gave a mirthless laugh.

     "The truth will find the light, Severus."  Albus patted him reassuringly on the shoulder.

     He snorted behind his hands.  "How can it?  We don't even know what it is."

     "Don't we?"

     He slowly dropped his hands.  That was as close as the Headmaster was going to come to asking him if he had acted upon his festering malice and poisoned Potter.  He suddenly felt very tired, drained, as though the Fates had reached down and plucked the bones from his body.

     "No.  We don't."  He ran his fingers through his hair and then brought them down to knead his temples.

     Dumbledore mulled this over for a moment, tapping his chin thoughtfully.  Then he nodded, as if that were the response he had expected.  "Then, whatever it is, Severus, we shall find it together."

     Snape sagged beneath the weight of his relief and gratitude.  But it was not in him to articulate such thoughts, and so he merely nodded imperceptibly and began to study his surroundings.  It took him less than a minute to determine that the Arcanus Room was still an ugly place. It was bare except for the chairs Albus had commandeered from the manor.  In the walls rested the cobweb-festooned sarcophagi holding the earthly remains of the Black family, arranged chronologically from earliest to latest.  Juno's coffin was socketed in the vault furthest to the right, her tarnished brass nameplate reflecting the cold torchlight in a dirty bronze smear.

     All around him were reminders of what he could become, the bleak possibility of his own ignominious end.  Here lay the remnants of dreams and lives, the sad revenants of lives that had once walked the earth bearing dreams and cancerous hopes.  They were all forgotten, even by their kin, cast aside as undesirable, obsolete relics.  Those that did remember them cursed their names.

     _Is that the end that awaits you?_

     He thought it was.  He had no family to mourn him.  His father had been dead for nearly ten years, and his mother was gone long before that, her heart shattered by the accusations cast against her only son.  There were no cousins or uncles, no distant relations from some obscure, withered branch of the family tree.  The Snapes had never been a prolific clan, and when he was gone, they would be lost to the world.  The surname would live only in the minds of reluctant allies and bitter enemies.

     He had little doubt his students would remember him, though not with the saccharine visions of nostalgia.  He would live on as a bogey with which to terrify their recalcitrant children and as a curse to hurl at the unsuspecting back of a loathed supervisor.  His would be the remembrance of old fear.  The thought did not sadden him.  He had never lived his life for the approbation and everlasting affection of the world, but it did rankle him that once the last of his pupils succumbed to the dark lure of the earth from whence they had sprung, he would truly cease to be, even as a malevolent shade in the minds of children shivering beneath their bedclothes.

     There would be a gravestone in some forgotten cemetery, but no one would ever tend it.  The rain and snow and sleet would cover it, wear away the name etched by a carefully practiced hand until it was as blank and anonymous as the pile of moss-covered bones beneath it.  He had no legacy to leave; no plaque bore his name below any deed of renown.  Even the dubious honor of fleeting Quidditch fame had eluded him.  James Potter had ruled that kingdom with a golden Gryffindor fist.

     There had been a single, fleeting chance two years ago to leave something behind, but it had been snatched away from him at the last moment.  By Potter and Black, of course.  But he had been so close, not only to leaving his mark, however small, upon the world, but tasting the sweet, burning gall of vengeance.  He had had it all at the quivering tip of his wand.  Sirius Black, the wanted fugitive, hiding beneath the Whomping Willow with his werewolf companion and the sainted Potter boy.  It was perfect.  All that had remained to be done was to round them up and present them to Fudge.  Black would've been Kissed, and Potter and his congenital entitlement would have been expelled.  The Order of Merlin, Third Class would have been his, and along with it a piece of eternity.  But it had worked out that way.  Some sneaking coward had Stunned him, and when he awoke, all he had to show for it was a large, inexplicable knot on the back of his head.  Black was gone, and Potter was sitting smugly in his bed in the Hospital Wing.

     How he'd done it was never explained, but Snape knew that Albus had absolutely been involved.  Only he was cunning enough to both aid and abet a wanted felon and extricate Potter from the madness with nary a scratch.  He would probably admit it if Snape asked, but he really didn't want to know.

     _So much for the _trust in me_ gospel he spouts at every turn._

He snorted.  After all the reprieves and good faith leeway the Headmaster had shown him, he was allowed to bollix things now and then.  He cast a sidelong glance to his left to see if Albus was watching him, but the Headmaster was wandering his own paths, staring speculatively at the dusty torch bracket above Regulus Black's tomb.

     Further rumination was cut off by the arrival of Kingsley Shacklebolt and the Weasleys.  No one spoke as they entered.  Shacklebolt stomped his feet to rid his shoes of the omnipresent dust and found a seat among the empty chairs.  He nodded in greeting to both he and Albus.  His thin, smooth face was somnolent.

     "Headmaster, Professor," he said in his rich baritone.

     "Kingsley," the Headmaster answered, smiling.

     Snape murmured unintelligibly in response.  He had never gotten on with the other members of the Order, and frankly, inane chatter bored him.  Besides, he was preoccupied with the Weasleys, especially Molly, who was already sending beady, accusatory glares in his direction.  He fought to stifle a sigh.  Arthur had told her everything, no doubt, and she had clearly presumed his guilt.  The thought of her shrill voice rising above the civilized din of the subtle lynch mob made him cringe.  Sometimes he wondered how Arthur could stand it.

     By the looks of him, not very well.  He was wan and haggard, and his thinning red hair looked more sparse than ever, the dying embers of a once raging fire.  His open, eternally youthful face was finally giving in to the ravages of age.  There were fine lines around his eyes and deep grooves around his mouth that had not been there the year before.  Some of the exuberant joviality for which he was known had deserted him.  It was as though the terrible gravity of the world had finally broken through his cheerful façade.

     _Little wonder if he's married to _that_,_ he mused, eyeing the squat form of Molly.  She reminded him of a bulldog sizing up a particularly tender morsel.

     _At least he's married._

_     If that is what that much-vaunted institution has to offer, I'll kiss the ground for my solitary life._

_     You've only got yourself to blame._

_     Merlin bless my impeccable intellect._

The uncomfortable silence was broken by the steady, echoing rap of Alastor Moody's walking stick and the cautious shuffle of feet.  To Snape's ears, they sounded like the tolling of funereal bells.  As they drew closer, the rattling wheeze of Moody's labored breathing could be heard, and then, like the sibilant tributary to a raging river, the soft murmur of Lupin's voice.

     "Headmaster," Moody grunted, as he thumped into the room, leaning heavily on his walking stick.  No one said anything else until he had situated himself in the chair beside Shacklebolt and propped his stick between his knees.  Lupin merely waved and sat beside a glowering Molly Weasley.

     "Ah.  I was rather hoping Tonks would be with you," Dumbledore said, gazing hopefully to the mouth of the passageway.

     "She'll be along shortly, no doubt," grunted Moody.  "Bright girl, but not the most directionally minded."

     Snape sniffed at the understatement.  Nymphadora Tonks could lose herself within a circle.

     "We'll have to start without her, I'm afraid.  I'll leave it to you to pass along anything she may miss," Dumbledore said briskly.

     Moody merely nodded, pulled out his silver hip flask, unscrewed the cap, and took a long draught.  The rest of the Order sat forward, and the air was spicy with anticipation.

     "As I told Arthur early this morning, there has been an incident involving Harry Potter.  During an afternoon Potions lesson yesterday, he was given a dose of an Advanced Sleeping Draught he himself had brewed the week before, a dose that, prior to its administration, had been kept in Professor Snape's locked and warded cabinet.  Seconds after receiving the draught, Harry collapsed and was rushed to the infirmary.  He has been stable, but unresponsive ever since."

     Molly Weasley let out a watery sniff, but there was no real surprise.  Word had traveled quickly from Arthur to other Order members, stealthy and virulent as pestilence.  Shacklebolt shifted in his seat, and Dumbledore spoke again.

     "Upon reviewing his stores, Professor Snape discovered that a lethal dose of cyanide was missing."

     There were astonished murmurs at that, and Molly Weasley shot another outraged glare at him, as if to say she should have expected such a thing.  The first sharp tines of irritation pricked his skin.  If she had already made up her mind, then why was she here?  She had no relevance to the problem at hand.  Her role in the Order was to serve as den mother and anchor to the others.  If she thought he was a fiend, she ought to say so and be done with it.

     _That's not the Gryffindor way.  She has to keep up the pretense of justice.  _

     "Do we know for certain that's what caused this?"  Shacklebolt's resonant voice broke the silence.  His dark, graceful fingers were steepled beneath his chin.

     "No," Snape said.  "But if traces of it are found in Potter's system or in the shards of phial, we can make that assumption.  Cyanide is not an ingredient in the potion."

     "And if cyanide is responsible, what then?"  Moody took another pull from his flask and leaned forward, letting it dangle loosely between his knees.  Both his eyes were watching Snape with shrewd intensity.

     "Then we can try an antidote.  No guarantee it will work, however.  Antidotes are at their most effective in the first hour after ingestion."

     "What about a bezoar?"  Arthur kneaded his elbow joint thoughtfully, as though it pained him.

     "If I had one, it would likely keep him alive.  Unfortunately, they are becoming increasingly rare.  It seems goats have finally wearied of swallowing stones."  Snape sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.

     "You should have had one on hand," Molly snapped.  "You're a Potions Master, for Merlin's sake!  Were you simply too tight-fisted to buy one?"  Her chest was heaving, and her chin jutted defiantly.

     Snape gripped the sides of his chair to keep himself from throttling her.  Her haughty, sanctimonious face made him want to scream.  He fought to maintain control.

     "I wonder, Mrs. Weasley, if your indignation would be quite so vehement if this were anyone else?" he hissed.

     Molly shot to her feet, hands fisted at her sides.  "How dare you!" she spat, quaking in her rage.  "I have four children at the castle, in case you've forgotten.  I just want to know what kind of shoddy operation you're running.  I doubt you give less than a damn about your charges."  She was nearly frothing now, her nostrils flaring like a bull preparing to charge.

     "No student has ever been seriously injured in my care in seventeen years," he snapped, blood hammering in his temples.  

     "Dumb luck, and it finally ran out," she retorted hotly, eyes flashing.  "And how convenient that it just happen to run out on Harry, only son of your bitter enemy."

     He sprang to his feet.  "I've spent ten years of my life writhing and convulsing in my own filth just to keep that little ingrate alive," he snarled.

     _And you deserve every last second of it, _her eyes said.

    Arthur reached out a restraining hand, but she shook it off, her mouth trembling.

     Snape let out an exasperated sigh and folded his arms across his chest.  "Do you really think that after ten years of highly dangerous espionage, I would be thick enough, bloody _daft_ enough to poison darling Harry Potter, savior of the wizarding world, in front of thirty witnesses, two of whom are his closest friends?"  He stared at her in disgusted incredulity.

     She gaped at him, taken aback.  Clearly, that thought had never crossed her mind.  Her eyes darted to and fro, and her chin wobbled dangerously.  She squared her shoulders and drew herself up.  "If you were angry enough, yes," she answered at last, but creeping doubt tinged her voice.

     "Then it's as I feared," he said blandly, "Gryffindor and logic are mutually exclusive terms."  He sat down, his arms still folded across his chest, a barrier against further remonstrance.

     "You…you," she sputtered, and sat with a furious flounce.

     "Perhaps we should concentrate on the matter of restoring Harry to health before we set about the business of assigning blame," Dumbledore suggested mildly, and everyone turned to look at him.

     He gave a sad, listless smile, and seeing it made Snape's heart lurch in his chest and thump painfully against his ribcage.  It was such an alien expression on the Headmaster's steadfastly cheerful face, an expression more at home on his own sallow face.  He wanted to seize him by his brilliant red robes and shake him until the melancholy was swept from his venerable old heart like the sticky threads of old cobwebs, until the light returned to his eyes.

     _I'm the one who should look like that, not you, _he wanted to shout.  _You're hope, you're the Light.  You can't flicker out.  I'm lost if you do._

Further pursuit of this train of thought was derailed by the spectacular arrival of Tonks, who materialized from the passageway in a sprawl of arms and legs and eye-blindingly blue hair.  She landed at Dumbledore's feet with a soft thump, yelping as her chin struck the stone floor.  She sat up slowly, rubbing her chin and swiping at the thick layer of dust on her robes.

     "At last, Tonks.  So good of you to come, dear.  Are you all right?"  There was no trace of sarcasm or reproof in Dumbledore's voice, only concern and thinly disguised merriment.  He offered her his hand.

     "Er, yes, sir, I'm fine.  In a bit of a rush and lost my footing."  She smiled ruefully and heaved herself to her feet, gently gripping the Headmaster's deceptively strong hand.  "Thank you."

     "Not at all."

     Tonks seated herself in the drunken chair, and Snape waited for her to topple again, racking his brain for anything in the dark corridor that might have caused her to trip.  Miraculously, she stayed upright, and after a moment, he gave up the mental search for a culprit.  Her own two feet were all she needed.

     "Would a bezoar be of any help now, even at this late hour?"  It was Lupin.  He looked at Snape through haunted, weariness-smudged eyes.

     "It would keep him from dying," he said.

     "Is that a possibility?  I thought if he hadn't…well, you know, by now, he was safe."  Molly Weasley, on the verge of tears.

     "Of course it is," Snape snapped irritably, unnerved by the threat of maternal histrionics.  "Some poisons take months or years to work.  Cyanide, however, kills within minutes, so the fact that Potter is still alive is a good sign.  He has a remarkably strong resistance to toxins, as illustrated by his survival of an Acromantula bite in the Tri-wizard Tournament."

     There were grunts of acknowledgement from all around.  "How soon can you get one?"  Moody shifted his walking stick between his knees.

     "Hard to say.  They're extremely rare these days.  They can be especially ordered, but delivery is notoriously slow.  St. Mungo's may keep some on hand."

     "I'll ask around," growled Moody.  "Won't attract attention.  Fools will just chalk it up to 'paranoia.'  Young people today, so blithe, never considering the terrible possibilities.  Eating and drinking _anything_ put in front of them.  Sharing food."  He said this last as though he were discussing an act of gross sexual deviance.

     "And I'll get in touch with my brother, Aberforth.  He has always had a special affinity for goats," Dumbledore interjected, before Moody could get a full head of steam on the perils of eating, and there was a collective sigh of relief.

     Moody was just struggling to his feet when a voice from the corridor made them all freeze.

     "Why would Harry need a bezoar?"  Sirius Black asked, stepping from the shadows, his face contorted with fury, and his wild eyes fixed on Snape.

     "Sirius, how did-," began Arthur Weasley, but he got no farther.  Sirius let out a bellow of rage and charged Snape.

     Snape bolted to his feet, intending to sidestep the assault, but rage had made Black quick, and his thin shoulder caught him just above the left hip.  He staggered backward and spun, pulling his wand from his pocket in a fluid arc.  Black grabbed his arm, trying to wrench it downward, knock the weapon from his grasp.  Sour breath wafted into Snape's face, old Grunier and Ogden's Firewhiskey.  Repulsed, he twisted away, teeth bared in a snarl.

     Black lunged for him again, but the strong hands of Kingsley Shacklebolt and Arthur Weasley pulled him back.  His eyes rolled in their sockets, and his face had gone an alarming puce.

     Snape stepped away from him, his wand pointed at his throat.  With his free hand, he smoothed his robes.  "Been drinking, Black?" he spat, his eyes alight with feverish malice.  "Should have known you wouldn't put yourself to any good use."

     Black tried to break free, but his captors' grip was too firm.  "What did you do?  I know it was you.  What did you do, you bastard?"

     Snape rolled his eyes, bored with the overblown theatrics.  "_I _did nothing.  Young Potter was merely a victim of his own ineptitude."  He ignored an outraged gasp from Molly Weasley, relishing the crazed rage that suffused his nemesis' face.  "Like his father, he has discovered that fame will not save you in the end."  He smirked. 

     "Severus, that's enough," Dumbledore said from behind Black.

     But it wasn't enough.  Black had slipped through his fingers too many times, and now he was here, of his own volition, trapped like a fly in a spider's web.  He was going to seize the opportunity.  His wand jittered softly in his hand.  His forearm tingled in anticipation.  He could do it.  Just a flick of his wrist and two simple words.  They would send him to Azkaban, but what did that matter?  He had lived in his own private hell for years because of Black and Potter.  The Kiss might actually be a blessing.

     Black grinned, a wavering, mad twist of the lips.  "Go on, Snivellus.  You know you want to.  Go on and do it.  Kill me.  I'll see you on the other side."

     "Severus."  Dumbledore again, commanding, but also uneasy.

     Snape looked at Black again, his lips curving upward in a closed-mouth, bloodless smile.  "_Petrificus Totalus!"_

Black went rigid in Shacklebolt and Weasley's arms, and Snape stepped forward until they were nearly cheek to cheek, his breath tickling Black's grimy ear.  "Not here.  Not now," he whispered.  "But someday, I will kill you."

     He whirled away from Black's bug-eyed face, pointing his wand over his shoulder.  "_Finite Incantatem."  _He disappeared into the yawning dark of the corridor and was gone.

     


	26. The Last Free Detention of Rebecca Stanh...

Chapter Twenty-Six

     Four days after Harry Potter collapsed in the Potions classroom, Filch came for her again.  She was startled to see him there so soon, but she was glad, too, even if he wasn't.  It meant the game was about to resume, and that for now, at least, Professor Snape was safe.  So when Filch's sour, gnarled face appeared in the portrait hole, she handed the Exploding Snap cards with which she had been playing to Neville and left without a word.

     "Thought he'd finally shown his customary good sense and written you off," Filch muttered disagreeably, shambling along on arthritic knees and holding his tarnished lantern aloft to illuminate the gloomy corridor.

     "Yes, sir," she answered noncommittally.

     Filch grunted and kept moving, Mrs. Norris close upon his heels.  In the dim light, his craggy, gangly form cast grotesque distorted shadows upon the walls.

     _I'm following the bogeyman_, she thought, but there was no terror in it, only a bemused whimsy.

     Following the bogeyman to the den of the serpent, and she was not afraid.  In fact, the unease that had been roiling in her stomach in clots of thick, greasy bile eased with each step.  Soon now, she would emerge on the dark, claustrophobic playing field and pick up the weapons of war again.  He would challenge her, push her, keep her on her toes.  And that was what she craved.  The useless idyll of playing card games in the Common Room was seductive, but it was also dangerous.  She could grow accustomed to it far too easily.  If she went long enough, her mental muscles, taut and lean from months of combat, would grow flabby again.

     _It's not just the game you miss.  It's him, too.  You're worried about him, the captive fearing for the captor._

     _Fee fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman._

     She did smell blood, blood in the water, blood from a deep and terrible wound.  So did the rest of the students and staff, and they were hungry for it, salivating like starving dogs, their canines wet with anticipation.  Already they had begun to circle, drawing ever closer, sensitive noses quivering with the delicate tang of mortality.  They had been waiting for a long time; the serpent had cut many of them to the quick with his quicksilver tongue, and in their hearts they had begun to despair of ever bringing him low.  Now the wound had been opened, and the chance lay before them.  They would be fools not to seize it.

     Filch stopped at the classroom door and waited until she reached the threshold.  "Be glad when he's had his fill of you, I will.  Wastin' my time dragging you down here when I could be after that blasted Peeves."  He trudged off, leaving the darkness to swallow her up.

     When he was gone, and the dull echo of his footsteps had faded, she reached out and rapped on the door.

     "Come."

     She turned the knob and shoved open the door.  It swung back to reveal Professor Snape hunched over his ill-lit desk, quill in hand, and scowling furiously at the parchment in front of him.  The familiarity of the scene was so overwhelming that a grateful sigh escaped her.

     "Rest assured, Miss Stanhope, that my joy at the prospect of another evening with you and your alarming ineptitude is matched only by my boredom.  Get in here and close the door," he muttered, stabbing his quill into the inkpot.

     "Yes, sir."  She rolled inside and closed the door.

     "You're thirty seconds late," he said without looking up.  "Thirty points from Gryffindor."

     "Yes, sir."  

     _He's bearing up well, I see,_ she thought wryly, and went to gather her supplies.

     She gathered up her supplies and ensconced herself in her usual seat.  Professor Snape's quill scratched irritably across the parchment he was grading; the sleeve of his robe slashed across the paper, punishing it for its insolence.  He was clearly in no mood for the appalling ignorance with which his charges routinely supplied him.  

     _It's just like it should be.  But not quite.  Something's missing._

She watched him through half-lidded eyes, chopping her jackal meat with exaggerated care so as not to inadvertently amputate her fingertips.  His nose was buried in the stack of parchments, his eyes fixed on the various scrabbles there, but she knew he would look up if she stared too long.  He would sense her gaze on the greasy crown of his head, and those black eyes would come up to meet her curious blue ones.  But she couldn't tear herself away.  The erratic chopping of her cutting knife ceased altogether, and she let it droop silently to the desk.

     What was it?  What was different?  The robes were the same, immaculately pressed and spotless.  The same polished boots planted firmly beneath the desk, the same starched white collar, the one that made him look like a disgraced Puritan minister.  His hair was still greasy and lank, and his hooked nose still jutted from his pasty face.  His expression of dour endurance remained unchanged.  

     It was like looking at the puzzle pictures on the back of cereal boxes.  _Find the differences between the two pictures._  She had been good at them as a small child, but this one was proving impossible.  There was no ridiculous incongruity to catch the eye.  Professor Snape wasn't wearing a bow tie or polka-dotted underwear.  He sported no third limb.  He was exactly as he had ever been, and yet the sinking feeling of wrongness persisted, the first warning heat of long fever.

     She shook herself and picked up her knife.  She was being ridiculous, succumbing to the mute hysteria that had pervaded the castle since Potter's collapse.  There was nothing wrong with Professor Snape.  He was as caustic and miserable as ever.  If she wanted proof, all she had to do was keep doing nothing.  When he noticed the absence of cutting noises coming from her desk, he would visit his wrath upon her head with grim vigor.

     As worried as she was about him, she wasn't about to subject herself to _that._  She gripped the biting steel of the knife between her stiff fingers and resumed her work.  After a few minutes, her breathing synchronized with the rhythm of the blade.  In. _Clop._  Out. _Clop.  _The tension in her shoulders, there since she had awakened that morning, eased with the creaking pop of tendons.  Back and forth went the knife, and soon she was lost in the comforting monotony.

     Her thoughts did not intrude again until she was grinding her rosehip in the mortar and pestle, the spicy, sweet scent stinging her nostrils.  Her wrist throbbed dully from the exertion of pounding and twisting the wide, smooth pestle, and the burning discomfort  made her grimace.  Things weren't usually this bad.  The four-day respite had clearly done more harm than good.  She loosened her grasp and readjusted, rubbing absently at the aching joint and muscle.

     She risked another peek at Professor Snape and discovered that his position was the same as it had been when she'd entered, though she saw his eyes dart to the hourglass on the edge of his desk.  Still timing her.  She snorted in incredulous admiration.  Meticulous and efficient of movement as a Swiss watch.  Nothing wasted.  His quill paused in its flow across the parchment, and she looked down before he caught her watching him.

     Though the instant of irrational fear had passed, an unsettling kernel of unease still lodged in the pit of her stomach.  She shifted painfully in her chair, hissing as her hip spasmed.  She heard the quill hesitate in mid-stroke again.  He was watching her.  She could feel his quiet appraisal against the sensitive flesh of her scalp.  She held her breath.  Five seconds.  Ten.  The petulant hiss of quill tip to parchment began once more, and she exhaled softly through her nose, sagging in her chair.

     She dumped the rosehip into her cauldron and stirred it.  She knew she'd botched the Draught again.  It was still too thick, and the shimmering steam coming from the kettle carried with it the sour smell of old cabbage instead of the earthy, rooty smell of anise seeds.  The color was getting closer, though.  That should count for something.

     _With any other professor, it would.  But this is Professor Snape, and unless your potion raises the dead, he won't care.  Even then, he might not.  It's not a Camoflous Draught, after all._     

     She smirked.  It would be only to easy to imagine him discrediting an accidental miracle potion and throwing it away simply because it hadn't turned out as he'd expected.  She removed the ladle, set it gently on the desk, and waited, hands folded in her lap.  Judging by the nearly empty upper chamber of the hourglass, he would be coming to inspect her work at any moment.

     Sure enough, as soon as the last grain of sand dripped into the bottom, he put down his quill and pushed back his chair.  He stood slowly, his knees cracking, and as he glided toward her, she noticed the limp.  It was slight; anyone not accustomed to the lissome grace of his movements would have missed it.  She furrowed her brow and bit her lip.  She couldn't imagine him being careless enough to bump into something or fall.  And he was hardly old enough for the onset of arthritis.

     _Have the Potter zealots gotten their claws into him already?_

A disturbing image arose in her mind of the professor being chased across the castle grounds by a mob wielding heavy stones and thick broomsticks, spilling across the lawns in a red, purple, and yellow tide, roiling and frothing in a single vengeful current, intent on swallowing up the fleeing black speck trying to outrun its judgment.  From the pulsing heart of the writhing, sentient flood came a rock, hurled with pinpoint malice.  It struck home with a meaty thud, just above the left hip.  The professor dropped to one knee, lurched back to his feet, and staggered on, clutching the wounded hip.  But the bloodlust was on them now, and more stones rained down in a lethal hail.

     She pushed the horrifying image from her mind.  She was letting her imagination run amok.  She would have heard about a frothing mob descending on a Hogwarts professor.  News like that would have spread throughout the school in a matter of minutes.  Besides, Dumbledore would never allow such mayhem.  He was dotty, but he was fair, and she was certain violence dispensed via rage-blinded lynch mob did not meet his criteria of justice.

     _It's those damn dreams.  That's what's making you so edgy._

     She preferred not to think about that.  She hadn't had those dreams in four years, and that they had come back filled her with a swooning dread.  They had nearly destroyed her sanity the first time around.  For months after the death of her best friend, she had lain in her bed and shivered convulsively beneath the antiseptic coverlet, thrashing in the grips of hellish nightmares.  She had screamed and shouted in her sleep for minutes on end, clawing at the air and recoiling from faces that existed only in the clinging tendrils of her dreams.  Sometimes it took three brisk slaps from Dinks to rouse her, and often she had awakened to find she'd torn at herself in the extremity of her terror, leaving long, bloody weals on her arms and neck.  With time, the nightmares had stopped, and her fear of the dark had faded.

     _But you had a dream last night, didn't you?_

     Last night.  And the night before last.  And the one before that.  Always the same.  She couldn't remember it clearly, but she recollected enough to be sure she didn't _want_ to know the rest.  Beds with bloodstained sheets and teeth and hair embedded in their eerily glowing white frames.  White-frocked nurses, tall as skyscrapers, looming over her with forbidding, lifeless gazes.  Corridors that stretched into gaping nothing.  The sound of weeping.  The gassy stink of diseased rot.

     She had jerked awake in total darkness, eyes bulging from their sockets, the sheets bunched beneath her fisted fingers, her nails punching through the thin cotton to graze her palms.  The air had lodged in her throat, dry as starched wool, and for a panic-stricken instant, she'd thought the demons of her past had come to throttle her while she battled the stalking shadows.  Then, a shuddering, gagging sob had escaped her, and she called for Dinks twice before she remembered where she was.  Winky had come, peering over the edge of the bed with frightened, solicitous eyes, normally drooping ears pricked and alert.  Bodies had shifted uneasily; linens rustled, and Hermione's sleep-choked voice had drifted across the suddenly listening silence, asking if she was all right, and would she like a glass of water?  Winky's soothing, fluttering hands.  Then more patchwork sleep.

     Three nights, and she wasn't sure she could endure another.  She had nearly fallen asleep in Arithmancy today.  She'd managed a nap during lunch, but she still felt logy and exhausted.  If the nightmares persisted, she would have to go to Madam Pomfrey and ask for a dose of Dreamless Sleep, and that would prompt questions, none of which she wanted to address.  It would also provoke invasive prodding.  They might even try to make her sleep in the Hospital Wing, and if she had to sleep in the same room as the deathbed, she would lose her mind.

     _It'd send old McGonagall over the edge, too.  She'd burn a blazing path to the Headmaster's door.  No secret what she'd say, either.  She'd wag her bony finger and proclaim that Professor Snape had finally succeeded in breaking your will and your mind.  _Best to avoid that if she could.

     _You could ask Professor Snape for a dose.  _

     _Not a chance._

_     Still afraid he'll poison you?_

_     No.  But after the Golden Child keeled over in his classroom, he's hardly going to freely distribute potions to anyone who asks, even if they _are_ relatively harmless.  Probably interrogate me for hours.  Might even ask Filch to dust off the thumbscrews._

     Professor Snape bent over the cauldron, the corner of his mouth tensing in momentary discomfort.  His cloak shifted, and her nose was inundated with the dry smell of allspice.  She was tempted to inhale deeply, drink in the comforting odor, but she didn't want to draw his scrutiny, so she contented herself with taking tiny, clandestine sniffs.

     "Suffering from post-nasal drip, Miss Stanhope?" he asked, prodding the tip of his index finger into the brew on her desk.  He withdrew it, sniffed, and scowled.

     "No, sir," she said, unable to mask her surprise.

     "Thankfully.  I don't believe my handkerchief could withstand another assault."  He straightened, and the faintest frown passed over his face.  He gestured dismissively at her cauldron.  "Hideous, as usual," he snapped.  His wand materialized at his side.  "Nine weeks and no progress whatever.  _"Evanesco!"  _The cauldron was empty again.

     She opened her mouth to refute him, but her weary brain caught up with her intention at the last second and averted catastrophe.  Instead, she said,  "Yes, sir."

     He turned away from her and returned to his desk, and as he retreated, her eyes were drawn to the limp again.  Unease clenched its greasy, icy fist around her back, and she dug her nails into the palm of her hand to stifle a surprised cry.  She exhaled slowly through her nose, mentally counting to ten.  

     _I've got to relax.  I can't have an attack in here.  They'll think he's done it._

She gritted her teeth, riding out the spasm.  She forced her hands to concentrate on navigating the chair toward the storage cabinet.  The pain was a sharp, constant hammer, smashing into her lower back in a constant staccato.  It spread downward, radiating into her hips and jabbing the tender flesh behind her knees.  Mary, Mother of God, it was bad.  The aching, throbbing pressure increased, and tears blurred her vision.  She was spasming so hard that she could feel her flesh shifting as the agonized muscles contracted.  

     _Thou shalt have no other gods before me, for I am a jealous God, and easily wroth._

     _What have I done _now_?_ she thought dismally, her hand locking around the joystick of her chair.

     The pain reached a monstrous crescendo, tearing through her lower back with savage, frenzied claws.  She pressed her lips tightly together, until they were white as the flaccid underbelly of a dead fish.  A scream was massing inside her throat, making her jaws seize with the need to open and release their prisoner, a need she could not grant.  Not here, in this room, with this man.  

     Just when she thought she could take no more, when the shrill scream was about to tear itself from desperate, clutching lips, the cramp eased, and she took in an exhausted, shaky breath, wrenching her trembling hand from the joystick and resting it on her knee.  That one had been bad, the worst she'd had since her arrival at Hogwarts.  She prayed there wouldn't be any more.

     _You know better._

     She sighed, wiggling her fingers to maximize flexibility for the task of gathering jars and phials.  He had already forgiven her one; he would not excuse another.  She had hoped the cramps and spasms that had occasioned her life as far as she could remember had been left at D.A.I.M.S., had lost their way as they passed over the vast expanse of the Atlantic.  They belonged to the other life, not this one, and it seemed only fair.  But here they were again, as brutal and unrelenting as ever.

     It had been idealistic and childish of her to think that a simple change of scenery would banish them forever, but she had grown weary and bored with pragmatism, and it had been enticing to think that the benign magic of the castle would somehow protect her.   It had been a cotton candy fantasy, the kind in which so many others readily indulged, but which she had seldom entertained.

     The pain had dissolved it in the crushing grip of its stone fingers, and she gave a defeated, embittered sigh.  She swiped her hand on her robes and began to gather her supplies.  She would need the pointer stick to gather the rosehip, but that was last, so it could wait.  She wanted to collect herself before she drew close to the professor.

     The second jolt of pain struck as she was reaching for the powdered dung beetle.  She froze, arm extended over her head, her fingers digging into the thick wood of the storage cabinet shelf.  She gagged, and sickly sweet bile coated her throat.  Tears streamed down her face; the pain was so intense that now she _couldn't_ cry out.  All the breath seemed to have fled her body.  Sweat trickled from her palm, sliding sluggishly to her elbow.

     She tried to call out, but his name died on her lips.  All that emerged was a sputtering cough.  Her back was in a vise, one that must be contorting her bones, twisting them into improbable shapes.  Her upraised arm trembled violently, causing the phials and jars to jingle somnolently.  This was without a doubt the worst spasm attack she had ever had.  God was closing his fist around her fragile torso, and if He didn't let go, she was going to strangle to death.

     "Time is up, Miss Stanhope."  Professor Snape's voice, disinterested, remote as the sun.  Her ears seemed to be filled with water.

     _Oh, please, sir.  Please look over here.  If there were ever a time when I needed you to be pissy and impatient, this is it._

     The cramp let go with an audible creak of musculature, and she pitched forward, the arm not gripping the shelf curling around the cauldron.  Her upraised arm dropped bonelessly to her side, narrowly missing the edge of the middle cabinet.  She closed her eyes and inhaled the warm smell of wool and the faint, lingering odor of lavender soap.  Her lower back sizzled with the aftermath of the wrenching spasm.  The skin there felt loose and hot, electrically charged with unspoken threat.

     Professor Snape's quill fell silent.  "Thirty points for dawdling."

     "Sir, I-," she began weakly.

     "None of your asinine excuses, Miss Stanhope.  Collect your ingredients and get to work.

     Her back to him, she weighed her options, fingers clutching reflexively at the cauldron.  She could simply turn and roll out the door and to the Gryffindor Common Room.  If she dialed the chair up to full speed, he'd have to run to catch her, and with his limp, she didn't think it likely.  If he hexed her with an Immobilizing Curse and dragged her to the Headmaster's Office, Dumbledore would see what was happening.  He never missed anything.  He would let her go to bed, and no one would ever know, ever see her like that.

     But if she ran, there would be a terrible price, one far worse than the pain she suffered now.  She would lose.  The grudging tolerance she had earned from Professor Snape would vanish, be swept aside in a single moment.  He would never forgive her for her disobedience.  That it was insubordination born of absolute, blind necessity would change nothing.  He would excommunicate her from his existence, reject her as an unsalvageable waste of his time.  She would cease to be, as far as he was concerned, and to be a shadow, an irrelevancy in his mind, was a fate to which she refused to be consigned.

     _Who gives a damn? _her logical mind snarled.  _You know what will happen if you don't leave._

Yes, she did, but she also knew what would happen if she _did._  She would be turned over to Pomfrey, forced into a bed, and doped out of her mind.  Pain management, they would call it, but it was really changing one hell for another.  She would be helpless, left to the mercy of her tortured mind.  She would see things she didn't want to see, remember things she had buried beneath the bedrock of her mind.  The drugs would strip away her defenses, and they would come for her.

     _He might take you there anyway._

     He might.  As her teacher, he probably should, but that was a risk she was willing to take.  If he had to carry her out, he wouldn't be able to accuse her of insubordination.  And the simple truth was that she wanted to stay.  Strange as it was, she felt safe here, protected.  If she went to the Hospital Wing, she would be surrounded by the lifeless, medicinal stink of astringent and the rotten, haunting smell of old sickness.  Here, it smelled of damp earth and moss and dried roots.  It smelled of the soil, and of renewal.  There _were_ less pleasant odors-ancient powdered dung, the faintly dizzying stench of formaldehyde-but overlying all of them like a comforting quilt were allspice and parchment dust.

"Yes, sir," she said thickly.

     It took another ill-tempered tongue-lashing from him before she gathered her supplies and returned to her desk.  He was clearly distracted, not even bothering to glance at her when she passed him in search of the pointer.  She watched him as she arranged her ingredients, lips unconsciously pursed in contemplative concentration.  He was tired, she could see, his shoulders slumped inside his elegant, utilitarian robes.  The tiny lines around his eyes were deeper, as though he hadn't slept well.  She wondered what he was thinking.

     About Potter, most likely.  He still had not stirred, and the Gryffindor Common Room was in a constant state of subdued hysteria.  Last night, a brawl had nearly broken out between Ron Weasley and the Doom Twins, Lavender and Parvati, when the latter had intoned, in all seriousness, that Harry would die before the Ides of March.  Their sentiment hadn't been appreciated, and Ron, acting as outraged best friend and Prefect, had summarily deducted forty points for trying to sow panic.  Lavender and Parvati had protested shrilly that he was trying to suppress their Inner Eyes, and in response Ron had tried to end the discussion via Permanent Silencing Charms.  He missed, a fact lamented by not a few.  Order was eventually restored by a trembling, whey-faced Hermione, and the House had settled uneasily into its wavering foundations once more.

     She shifted her thoughts back to Professor Snape as she worked, careful not to let her willful fingers stray into the cutting knife's uncertain path.  Had they decided his fate yet?  Was that why he was so tense, so worried?

     _No, I don't think so.  If they had, he wouldn't be here now.  He's waiting.  They're letting him swing a bit.  It's not the hanging that breaks your mind; it's the walk to the scaffold._

     She paused in her work as another spasm rippled up her back, a fleeting shiver that promised worse things to come.  She braced herself for the gut-wrenching jolt and suffocating pain, but it never materialized, and after a moment, she went back to slicing the meat.  Her eyes kept flicking impatiently to his desk, hoping to see something that would betray the reason for his disquiet, but he merely sat in his chair, stolid and inscrutable as ever.

     What would happen to him if it was found that he _had_ done something to blessed Potter?  Would they really kill him?  She wasn't familiar with Dementors.  She had heard of them, yes, but she had never seen one.  What did they do?  Did they really suck out you soul?  She looked up at him, profoundly disturbed at the thought of all that intellect and grace being torn out and cast aside, of the glittering black pools of his eyes devoid of life or any spark of humanity.  She shuddered, disgusted.

     Suddenly, he dropped his quill onto the desktop and buried his face in his hand.  She was so startled by the gesture that her mouth dropped open.  She fully expected him to weep, but he didn't.  He sat utterly still, elbows propped on the desk, fingers furrowed in his hair.  She waited for him to sit up again, to notice her gawking at him in unabashed confusion, but the strange posture continued.  It radiated defeat and a terrible helplessness, and seeing him that way frightened her.  Her earlier dread returned, coating her stomach in a thin scrim of ice.  

     She licked cracked lips with a sandpaper tongue.  "Sir, are you all right?" she ventured softly.

     He dropped his hands abruptly and fixed her with a cold, indignant stare.  "My welfare is none of your concern," he hissed with more asperity than he'd shown in quite some time.  His mouth was a tight line of disapproval.  "And if I don't see you working on that potion in three seconds, the Gryffindor point glass will be empty."  He glared at her.

     "Yes, sir."  Her head dropped to her work.

     She didn't give a fig about the Gryffindor point glass, but she wasn't going to provoke him further.  Best to leave him be.  Still, the worry would not leave her.  It lodged in her spine like the cold, cruel tip of a blade, and beneath it, the muscles twinged, warning of a sleepless night ahead.

     Snape sat behind his desk and scowled at the top of her head.  He was sorry he'd summoned her.  The stubborn little chit was too curious for her own good, for anyone's good.  He should have left her in the Gryffindor Common Room where she belonged, out of his hair and out of harm's way.  She had Gryffindor in her, whether she liked it or not, the unconquerable need to interfere, to challenge, to know that which was none of her business.

     But he'd called for her because he knew she would come.  It would never cross her mind not to, that maybe she ought not to spend time alone in the presence of the skulking, disagreeable professor who was tacitly accused of poisoning her most famous Housemate.  She was either incredibly stupid or stupendously naïve.  Maybe she was both.  Whatever she was, she had come.  She could have appealed to McGonagall and been excused.  Especially now, but she hadn't.  It was as if she'd known he needed the routine.

     _Bollocks.  You're giving her far too much credit.  She came because she was told, and because she'd rather have her teeth prised from her mouth with red-hot pincers before she went to McGonagall.  She'd didn't do it because she gave a damn about you._

His brow creased as he looked at her.  Truth be told, she didn't look well, even for her.  She was moving slowly, with exquisite care, as though struggling beneath the weight of hidden pain.  Her face, always pale, was nearly translucent, and there were deep, bruised pouches beneath her eyes.  It had taken her three times as long as it should have to collect her supplies, and that was odd.  Even on her first night of detention, locked in the thrall of absolute terror, she had done better than that.

     He thought about asking if she were all right, then quashed the impulse.  He didn't really care, and he wasn't about to start coddling her now.  Her condition wasn't going to excuse her from discipline.  Whatever was troubling her could wait until he was finished with her.

     He dipped the point of his quill into his inkwell and snorted softly.  Besides, he had weightier problems at hand.  The first of the alarmist letters would reach parents and Ministry officials in the morning, and life as he knew it would come to a screeching halt.  Aurors would likely be dispatched to the school before the breakfast plates were Banished from the tables.

     What a treat.  Weasley and the rest of the Gryffindors will be able to cheer as I'm led away.  My disgrace will be complete.

He pushed the image of Ronald Weasley cheering and holding aloft a Gryffindor pennant as the Aurors dragged the reviled Potions Master away and the rest of the student body capered on the tabletops from his mind and stabbed his quill irritably across a homework parchment.  Didn't the simpleton realize that Monk's Hood and Wolfsbane were the same bloody thing?  He tossed the offending document aside, dropped his quill, and massaged his temples.  Hopeless.  They were all hopeless.

     She was still watching him, naturally.  Not overtly, not with that unrepentant, calculating expression that drove him absolutely mad, but surreptitiously.  He could see the upward flicker of her eyes beneath half-closed lids and the improbable shield of her honeywheat eyelashes.  They never lingered long, but he always knew when they were upon him.  In no small part because her cutting grew careless, almost drunken when she wasn't minding her knife.

     As he watched, her knife slipped, cutting into meat and nicking the grain of the wooden desktop.

     "Ten points for carelessness," he murmured, but there was no venom behind the words.  He was too tired.

     "Yes, sir," came the implacable response.  The knife lurched painstakingly into a more acceptable position.

     He sighed, wishing for a dose of Anti-Ache Powder.  It had been a long time since he had suffered so many skull-splitting headaches.  As a teenager, they had plagued him almost daily, huge, thunderous affairs that nearly blinded him with their intensity, made his stomach lurch and writhe beneath his skin, a greasy burlap bag.  Free of Potter and Black's constant haranguing, they had faded.  But he had one now.  He pressed his fingers into his temples, trying to force the pain away, but it was tenacious, hammering into his head like a ten-pound mallet.  

     He got up and went to the storage cabinet.  He heard Stanhope's knife stop; she was no doubt intrigued by this peculiar behavior.  Nosy child.  He opened his mouth to scold her, but a surge of brittle, hot pain throttled his retort.  He winced.  Damn that child.  Well, let her look all she pleased.  It would give him a reason to snatch more points from Gryffindor.

     He scanned the shelves for his bottle of Anti-Ache, swallowing a bitter, chalky taste in his mouth.  He squinted against the torchlight that suddenly seemed to sear his corneas.  Merlin in a trenchcoat if he wasn't getting a full-blown migraine.  He carefully shifted the myriad jars, phials, and bottles, grimacing as their smooth glass surfaces winked in the dim light, the refraction lancing through his eyeballs.

     _Where the blazes _is _it?_ he thought savagely.  He had brewed a full jar just the night before. 

     This was all Potter's doing.  If the stupid boy hadn't keeled over in his classroom, he wouldn't be in this predicament.  He could have dropped in any other lesson-Transfigurations, Charms, Divination, but he had chosen to collapse in _his_ classroom.  The convenience of his timing was galling.  It was almost as if he had known the trouble he would cause, had planned it just to muck with his life.  Another infamous Potter prank.

     He knew the idea was preposterous, but because it was Potter, the notion attained an eerie plausibility in his mind.  James Potter hadn't been above putting himself and others at risk in the name of tormenting him.  Why should the son be any different?  Potter had loathed him measure for measure, and despite what anyone else believed, the boy had a vengeful streak the width and breadth of his back.  He wouldn't put it past him to fake his own attempted murder in order to rid himself of his old nemesis.

     _You might not be in this mess if you had kept a bezoar on hand,_ a small voice insinuated.  

     Molly Weasley's shrill accusation echoed in his ears.  He sneered reflexively at it.  What did she know?  The fact was, he _had _kept a bezoar.  Or tried.  Each time he bought one, it mysteriously vanished from the emergency kit kept beside the taps.  Stolen by sticky-fingered pupils and tossed into the lake, no doubt.  After the third one was lost, he had given up.  The discretionary budget simply couldn't cover it.

     _And I never had need of it.  Not in seventeen years_, he thought furiously.  _Not until Potter.  Stupid boy.  I wish I had never laid eyes on him.  Or his father._  

     "Damn!" he hissed.  The jar was nowhere to be found.  He distinctly remembered placing it on the uppermost shelf last night.

     "Stanhope," he snarled, "did you shift any of the bottles or phials on the top shelf?"

     Her knife grew quiet in mid-chop.  He could feel the weight of her gaze settle on the nape of his neck.  Pain, bright as polished quartz, darted from the base of his neck to the top of his skull.

     "No, sir.  Only the rosehip."  A thoughtful silence.  Then, "Sir, are you-,"

     "I believe we have already covered this ground, Miss Stanhope.  Your concern is neither warranted nor welcome.  Are you absolutely certain that you disturbed nothing?" he hissed, closing his eyes against an explosion of pain in the back of his head.  He knew he was being harsh, but he was past caring.  All he wanted now was for the gargantuan, nauseating pain to stop.

     "Yes, sir."  She sounded muffled.

     He finally spotted the Anti-Ache in the furthest corner of the top shelf and snatched it from its space with impatient fingers.  He carried it over to the washbasin, unscrewing the top and setting it on the counter.  He pressed his fingers into his temples as another surge of pain crested behind his eyes.  He had forgotten how wretched these headaches were.  If he were lucky, the nausea would wait until he returned to his chambers to turn him inside out.  The last thing he needed was for Stanhope to see him retching into the sink.  That loathsome Gryffindor instinct to meddle in the name of succor would overtake her, and she would flitter about him like an uneasy sparrow and fret that he should see Pomfrey at once.  Never mind that she herself would rather be flogged with a nettle-covered whip than taken to the infirmary.

     He yanked open one of the drawers beneath the sink and plucked out a spoon, then closed it with a vicious shove.  He scooped a teaspoon of the powder from the jar and spooned it directly into his mouth.  The dry, ash taste made his lips pucker, but he forced it down, grimacing.  Not the best way to administer it, but it was the quickest, and he needed relief now.  He stomach clenched, threatening to reject the bitter nostrum, but he willed it to acquiesce, biting his tongue until the mutinous rumblings ceased.

     He replaced the lid onto the jar and carried it back to the shelf.  He had just replaced it when there came a sharp exhalation from behind him.  Startled, he wheeled around, half-expecting to see that Stanhope had dropped one of her ingredients or splashed herself with the hot contents of her cauldron.  His mouth was already forming a scathing retort, a choice bon mot that would splash scarlet shame across her cheeks, but the words died in his throat.  He stood frozen, unable to even blink, and dread settled into the pit of his stomach like a cement slab.

     _It's finally happened, _he thought incredulously.  _She's having that fit McGonagall's been vexing about for months.  Won't Minerva be pleased?_

     He stood rooted to the spot.  For the second time in a week, a student was collapsing in his classroom, before his very eyes, and he hadn't the slightest idea what to do.  Had she poisoned herself when his back was turned, ingested some of the Draught before it was finished?  

     _She's inept, not stupid.  _

     He found his voice, pulling his wand from his robes and starting toward her.  "Miss Stanhope!" he barked.

     She was pushed away from her desk, doubled over on herself, arms folded against her abdomen, long blonde hair hanging in a thick, golden curtain to her ankles.  Her misshapen, matchstick legs jutted outward at a ninety-degree angle from her body, rigid as mangled tentpoles.  Her face was between her knees, and from the voluminous folds of her robes came the sounds of weeping.

     _What is wrong with this child? _he thought frantically, his wand crushed between his fingers.  _Burst appendix?  She'll have to be taken to St. Mungo's._  "Miss Stanhope!"

     This time she looked at him, raising her head on a wobbly neck.  Tears were streaming down her blotchy, red face, and clear mucus dripped from her nose onto the lap of her robes.  He was repulsed, but he was also relieved to see that her blue eyes were not glassy and vacant.  She was there, hideously self-aware, as a matter of fact.  She was looking at him in perfect cognizance of who he was.  Not some mad, frothing fit, then.  The fingers gripping his wand relaxed.

     He understood something else as he looked into her face.  Whatever this was, she was well acquainted with it.  There was pain etched in every feature of her small, wasted face, a bone-deep, searing misery, but there was no surprise.  Resignation and fury and curdled bitterness, but no confusion.  She knew precisely what was happening, and she hated it.

     "Miss Stanhope, what is it?" he asked, masking his unease with a snarl.

     She tried to answer him.  He saw the effort; her lips pulled back in an agonized snarl, and from her throat came a sound that might have been the beginning of his name, but it was cut off by a soundless, breathy shriek as her leg convulsed beneath her, bending at the knee, and then thrashing outward again.  Her mouth snapped shut, and she screamed behind her teeth.

     _Cruciatus.  That is what this looks like.  As if an invisible someone has placed her under the Cruciatus Curse, and is torturing her to death._  The thought made him inexplicably nervous, and he scanned the room, as though he expected a figure to loom from the oily shadows with its wand raised in cruel triumph.  There was no one, of course, but he strained his ears to detect the sound of stealthy footsteps all the same.  There could be no other explanation for this.

     _You've lost your mind, standing about like a gormless mountain troll while one of your students writhes at your feet._

     He snapped out of his horrified reverie and raised his wand to his throat to call for help.  This was clearly far beyond his ken, leagues beyond it, and he wanted someone, _anyone _to take the matter out of his hands.  He was a Potions Master, not a Mediwizard, and he was unequipped for an emergency like this.  The last person to contort and writhe in front of him in such a terrible fashion had been doing so because he had wished it, had been pointing his wand at their midsection and muttering, "_Crucio!"  _He was adept at causing unspeakable agony, not soothing it.__

He opened his mouth to utter "_Sonorus!",_ but one of Stanhope's clawed hands shot out and clutched the sleeve of his robe, yanking his wand away from his throat.  

     "No, no, no," she rasped, squeezing his robes between scorching fingers as another convulsion gripped her.  

     He sputtered at her bald audacity.  She had clearly taken leave of her senses, grabbing at him that way.  He wrenched his arm away from her, teeth bared in a white snarl.  "Don't be ridiculous, stupid girl.  You need help, and I cannot give it."  He raised his wand again.

     "No, sir, NO!"  A desperate, beseeching wail, given force by a wave of renewed agony.  He could hear her teeth grind as she fought back a scream.  Her eyes rolled in their sockets, alive and glittering with pain.

     Her bony hand shot forth again, and this time her fingers coiled around his wrist.  The muscles, tendons and bones were boiling beneath her skin, the heat radiating from her pale flesh, wet and smothering as the baking heat of a kiln.  Her close-cropped fingernails bit into his skin, and her head jerked back and forth in whiplash denial.  _No._

     He stared at her in mute disbelief.  No?  As if she had a say in the matter.  He was not going to stand here and watch her dash herself to pieces.  Stubborn Gryffindor nobility could only be taken so far.

     "Enough, Miss Stanhope.  Ill or not, you have no right to touch me in that manner, or in any manner, for that matter.  One hundred points.  Now, stop this nonsense!" He pulled his wrist free of her burning grasp and retreated beyond her reach.

     Her mouth opened wide as she took a great gulp of air, and he waited, expecting her to either shriek or projectile vomit.  She did neither.  Instead, she spoke, each word torn from her mouth by sheer force of will.

     "They'll…come…for me…there.  I can't…fi…fi…fight them if they…drug…me."

     "What?" he said, knowing even as he spoke that he was speaking to someone who had temporarily disconnected from reality.

     She swallowed hard, jerking herself upright.  Her face was scarlet with effort and fever heat, and the arm still folded across her stomach was shivering violently.  Her eyes locked on his.  "The things I…I don't want to remem…remember will find their way out."

     His wand fell away from his throat.  What could he say to that?  He knew all about the things that came for you in the dark.  He had been fighting them for a long time, staving them off with bottles of Dreamless Sleep so he could sleep, or bottles of Pepper-Up Potion so he _couldn't._  Many times, his eyes had been as red-rimmed as the rising sun when he went to breakfast, dry and irritated from their constant vigil.  Albus constantly chided him about it, but his reluctance to sleep was sometimes his only defense against the monsters of his own making.

     _What can she see behind her eyes?_

     He knew what he could see, was familiar with every contour of each disfigured face.  His sins were many, and their grasping, searching hands were cold.  He saw bloody faces, lifeless corpses, wide, accusatory, dusty marble eyes.  He heard things, too, screams and pleas and weeping, the sound of infernal Curses striking home.  These sights and sounds haunted him, plagued his restless dreams and roosted in the corners of his chambers, awaiting their next opportunity.

     _What could she see?  She's too young._

_     You weren't._

     An image formed in his mind, one that, unlike so many others, had never faded into the distant, sepia tones of comfortable memory.  After all these years, it was still as vivid as it had been the night it was etched into the winding threads of his life.  Seven years old and curled in the darkened corner, snot clogging his nose and coating his lower lip, lank, unwashed hair falling into his stinging eyes.  Trembling fingers stopping his ears, trying fruitlessly to block the sound of the devil screaming.

     He shoved the thought away.  If he started dwelling on it, _he _would come unhinged, and Filch would find them both rocking and crooning senselessly in the morning.  He whirled away from her and went to retrieve the chair from behind his desk.

     "I can't smell you."  She sounded terrified.

     He retrieved the chair and set it down in front of her, careful to place it out of kicking range, his mind puzzling over the strange non sequiter.  Most people were put off by his scent, associating it with dampness, age, and prolonged confinement.  That she would crave it, actively seek it out was further demonstration of her hysteria.

     "Miss Stanhope, that is enough," he said blandly, feigning a calm he did not feel.

     Another spasm wracked her, and he saw her trapezius muscle jump.  She bowed, as though an invisible hand were yanking her hair.  She cried out, spittle flying from between her clenched teeth.

     _Merlin, this is bad._

     But he only said, "Enough, Miss Stanhope."

     Incredulity flashed across her face.  "I can't st-stop it," she said breathlessly.

     "Perhaps not, but you can control how it affects you.  You're giving in to panic.  It's feeding off your useless hysteria.  Make it stop," he snapped.

     "I told you, sir, I can't."  She was angry now.

     "Do you like playing the victim?" he snarled.

     She gagged as another spasm seized her, her fist clenching.  When she opened her eyes, the fury was still there, but now it was accompanied by all-too-familiar stubbornness, and for the first time, he was glad to see it.  It meant he had captured her attention.

     "How?" she spat.

     "Focus on something other than the pain."

     She snorted, as if to say, _If I could do that, I wouldn't be here now._  

     He understood her skepticism.  It was all but impossible for him to do, and he had been afforded much practice over the years, writhing in the throes of Cruciatus as he often did.  There were few associations strong enough to rip the mind's attention from the monstrous liquid agony that usurped the blood in his veins.  Sometimes, nothing worked, but she didn't need to know that.  If she were lucky, she never would.

     "Your weakness is not my concern.  Perhaps if you stopped wallowing in self-pity, something suitable would come to mind."

     The effect of his retort was smothered by the worst spasm yet.  Her entire body went rigid, her arms pulling to her chest and her legs snapping outward with tendon-creaking force.  Her eyes bulged from their bloodless sockets, and her mouth opened in a breathless gape.  He saw the wet pink of her tongue and the bleached-bone whiteness of her teeth.  But he didn't hear the shaky, ragged intake of stale dungeon air.  The cramp was so pervasive that she could no longer breathe.

     _Salazar's balls, she's throttling herself._

     "Miss Stanhope, breathe," he snapped.  He reached out a hand to shake her, to shock her into taking a breath, then stopped, hand hovering in the air.  He'd sworn never to touch her again.  Not even to save his own life.

     _What about saving hers?  _

_     Spare me the melodrama._

_     Make her breathe.  Now.  If she dies in here, you swing.  No one will believe it wasn't your fault._

"Damn you, Stanhope!" he swore, and he reached out and clamped his hands over her scalding cheeks.

     Rebecca could not see him.  She was locked inside her mind, wrangling with her restless demons and trying desperately to shore up the buckling walls of her fortress.  Had she been capable of speech, she could have told him what was happening to her, but she had disconnected everything to keep the voracious memories at bay.  Blind, deaf, and mute, she was only dimly aware that she could not breathe.

     Acute quadriplegic convulsive spasticity was what the medical establishment called it, a dry, lifeless phrase that was wholly inadequate to describe what was happening to her.  The plain truth was that she had short-circuited, and her nervous system was doing its best to correct the fault.  Her overwhelmed body was fighting to regain control, but each time it gained ground, another tidal wave of pain swamped her weakening resistance.

     _Four years.  It's been four years, almost to the day._

     The exquisite pain blotted out linear reasoning, and so she did not consciously remember the significance of four years ago, but her subconscious was immune to the torturous assault, and its memories were carved into her very tissues.  Four years ago, her best friend had been swallowed by the bed in which he had lain, the bed that now waited in the Hospital wing.  It had been four years since her last attack.

     This one was killing her, or so it felt.  They had never lasted so long, nor had they been so ferocious.  They had never been allowed to proceed this far; the staff at D.A.I.M.S. had rushed her to the infirmary and pumped her so full of Darvon that she floated in a semi-conscious morass of dream fragments and hallucinatory nightmares.  Too stoned to know her own name, she had been blissfully unaware of the pain.

     Something warm enveloped her face, and suddenly her nostrils were flooded with the smell of allspice and parchment dust.  She instinctively turned her face toward the source of the scent, and soft fabric tickled her nose.  The gridlock in her chest dissolved, and she hitched her breath convulsively, sending blessed oxygen to her brain.  She tried to reach for the fabric, but her hand refused to obey, her brain unable to sort through the jumble of frantic signals from her body.  

     The white gauze covering her vision retreated, and Professor Snape swam into focus.  His face was less than an inch from hers, his eyes blazing from his blanched face.  This close, she was stunned by their beauty.  His eyelashes shimmered in the torchlight, liquid onyx scattered over virgin snow.  She was so transfixed by the sight that it took her a moment to register the fact that he was speaking to her.

     Her ears had still not recovered from the sensory overload brought on by the attack, and she only heard snatches of his words.

     "…oper tion of Flous Draugh?" he said.

     "I'm sorry, sir," she managed weakly, "I didn't hear you."

     "What is the proper preparation of the Camoflous Draught?" he demanded.

     "Sir?"  Based on his proximity, that was not the question she had anticipated.

     "You heard me."

     She blinked owlishly and took a deep breath, cautiously testing the condition of her diaphragm.  "Eight ounces of jackal meat, precisely cubed?" she ventured.

     "Go on."  He was eyeing her dispassionately, but she thought she detected a slight relaxation of his shoulders.

     "Well," she began, and then she realized that his hands were cupping her face.  She was so startled that the breath caught in her throat.

     He stiffened and jerked his hands away, rising to his feet.  He spun away from her, lip curling in a sneer.

     "Rest assured, Miss Stanhope, nothing untoward transpired during your bothersome display.  Of all the things you could possibly inspire, lust is not one of them."

     Her mouth dropped open.  That was the last thing on her mind.  She had simply been surprised that he had touched her at all, let alone with such fragile gentleness.  The idea that he had taken advantage of her in her helplessness had never entered into consideration.

     "Of course not, sir," she answered, the faintest trace of indignation in her voice.

     "You'll be utterly useless for the remainder of the evening, I suspect, so rather than waste any more of my precious time on a hopeless endeavor, I will return you to your Common Room."  He opened the classroom door and stepped out.

     She followed him without a word.  He did not speak until they were nearly at the portrait of the Fat Lady.

     "These attacks of yours could endanger your stay here," he told her.

     "This was the first one in four years, sir."

     "Nevertheless, there will be no more detentions.  You are clearly incapable of the rigorous physical demands."

     She stopped.  "Please, sir, I would like to continue.  It's not the detentions.  It's…," she trailed off, embarrassed by the note of urgency in her voice.

     He turned to face her, hands clasped behind his back.  "Yes?"

     She hesitated, unsure of how to finish the thought.  "Everything else," she concluded lamely.

     "Indeed." 

     He resumed his stride, boots echoing in the darkness.  The outline of the Fat Lady materialized from the gloom.  She trailed behind him, eyes fixed on the hem of his cloak.  He seemed wholly unfazed by what had happened, and she wasn't sure if she should be grateful for his stoicism or infuriated by it.  It was as though he had seen it all before.

     _Maybe he has._

She stopped.  "Sir?" she called.  The footsteps ceased.

     She rolled to where he stood.  He was looking down his crooked nose at her, obviously annoyed.

     "What is it?" he snapped.

     "How did you know what to do in there?"

     His jaw tightened, and for a split second she was convinced that she had overstepped her bounds.  He looked at her for a very long time, as if he were gauging her worthiness.

     "Experience," he said quietly, and turned away.

     "Sir?"

     But he was already fading into the darkness, and if he heard her, he gave no sign.  Then, from somewhere in the shadows, she heard him.

     "Eight o'clock, Miss Stanhope.  Not a second later."

     She turned and went into the Common Room with a weary smile. 


	27. Judgment Comes on Tiny Wings

Chapter Twenty-Seven

     Lucius Malfoy turned the piece of parchment over and over in his hands.  If the words it held were true, this was glorious news, indeed.  He read it again, his delicate, aristocratic mouth lilting in a handsome smirk.  His long, sculptured fingers caressed the letter like the flesh an adored lover.  The green ink glimmered from the page, beckoning him to take in its message once more.

_Father,_

_I am writing to tell you most interesting news.  This afternoon in Potions, Harry Potter took an Advanced Sleeping Draught he had brewed the week before.  Instead of simply falling asleep, he collapsed.  Of course, that cracked old swot, Dumbledore made a great fuss over him.  He and the blockheaded school nurse carted him off to the infirmary.  You should've seen their faces.  Quite comical, really._

_     He's still there as far as anyone knows, and I haven't seen Professor Snape all evening.  I expect he's being interrogated by Father Do-gooder.  Either that, or he's taking out his frustrations on that pitiful wreck of a Mudblood that transferred in at the start of term.  He seems to find great sport in that.  One can hardly blame him.  If you could only _see_ her, Father._

_     No doubt they'll try to blame Professor Snape.  McGonagall's been after him for years.  If they succeed, it'll be off to Azkaban with him.  Perhaps you could use your considerable influence at the Ministry to muddy the waters?  If they sack Professor Snape, there's no telling what sort of rabble they'll bring in.  Slytherin is appallingly under-represented on staff; as you know there are only two in Hogwart's employ._

_     Before I close, I must enquire about the Initiation.  I thought I was to be inducted just before the start of term.  Is everything well?  Have I done something to displease his Lordship?  I anxiously await your reply.  Send my regards to Mother._

_Your son,_

Draco 

     He carefully folded the letter and slipped it inside his robes.  He would send an answer tonight, along with a sack of Galleons as a reward for such diligence.  Frankly, such a display of promptitude from his only son was a bit of a surprise.  Draco was usually quite content to drift through life in a fugue of his own craft.  He was a lazy, indolent boy, always expecting him to clean up his messes.  He had no grasp of politics, of the need for subtlety.  He was crass and brash, utterly bovine.

     And yet, for reasons he would never fully comprehend, Narcissa loved him.  It was sickening, really, the way she doted on him.  Always twittering about him during their afternoon teas, boring him to tears as she droned on about what he might be up to at Hogwarts.  It was because of her that he continued to intercede on Draco's behalf.  If only to stop the incessant, maddening hectoring.  That and the need to protect his name.  He wasn't about to have it sullied because the only child Narcissa had seen fit to give him had turned out to be a waste of the body in which he was housed.

     He should have insisted on sending the boy to Durmstrang.  Karkaroff would have taught him the meaning of discipline, stiffened his flimsy spine.  Instead of wasting valuable time having his head stuffed full of useless notions like compassion and equality, he would have learnt skills that would serve him well in the coming war.  He would learn how to kill, how to crush his simpering enemies beneath his feet.  He would learn the fine art of torture.

     But Narcissa had pleaded, following him around the house, wringing her hands and whinging in her high, nasally voice until he retreated to the sanctuary of his study.  __

     _Lucius, it's so far away.  What if something should happen to him?  He needs to be where we can keep a proper eye on him._

     He grimaced at the recollection.  It was unseemly, the way she had begged.  In the end, just before he had relented, she had burst into tears, her blue eyes growing red and swollen and her nose running in a most unappealing manner.  He had been revolted, seeing her sniveling in front of him like any puling housewife.  She hadn't been the strong, haughty, independent woman he'd married, the one just as clever and ruthless as he was.  Her maternal instincts had contorted her into a screaming, impotent harpy.  He had relented just to banish the image, and they had slept in separate beds for a month thereafter. 

     Thankfully, the boy was wholly inured to Dumbledore's prattle about the common rights of man, about helping those less fortunate.  Thanks to Lucius' tutelage, Draco saw such gum-flapping dribble for what it truly was.  Inept as he was, there were some things that Draco simply knew.  The knowledge had come as part and parcel of his bloodline, and one of those things was that not all wizards were created equal.

     The only wizard worthy of the life with which the Fates had endowed him was a Pureblood.  The rest were so much chaff among the wheat.  What happened to them was of no importance; in fact, they deserved no more than to be ground to dust beneath the heels of their betters.  So his father had told him forty years ago, and his father before him, and his father before him, unto the generations lost to time and memory.  As it had been passed to him, so he had passed it to his son, and the line of this noble legacy would remain unbroken until the end of the world.

     There was a reason for the hatred once, but it had long been forgotten, and now it was enough that it existed.  It needed no justification, no rationale.  It was truth.  Not a truth everyone acknowledged or accepted, but undeniable all the same.  It was an ideology that, if heeded, would cure most of the world's ills.  To grow strong, that which was weak and useless, inferior, must be excised.  

     But blind sentimentality persisted.  The weak were allowed to live, and unchecked crossbreeding between wizards and Muggles was eroding the quality of magical stock every day.  Each time initiatives were brought before the Wizengamot to ban such deleterious practices, they were summarily overturned by liberal, expansionist twits who insisted on quantity over quality.  And while they engaged in congratulatory mutual masturbation over pints in shoddy, grubby pubs and sang beatitudes to their visionary ways, their society continued to crumble.

     He strode over to the wet bar in the southeast corner of his study, picked up a crystal tumbler, and poured himself a shot of barrel-aged brandy from the year 1798.  He sniffed the stopper of the decanter, careful to keep his pinky finger extended.  His nose tingled appreciatively at the spicy honey scent.  A fine year, if his nose spoke the truth.  He dipped his pinky into the thin, golden liquid and brought it to his lips.  Smooth, bold without being unctuous.  He had chosen well.

     In his younger days, before marriage and his obligations as a Death Eater had usurped most of his time, he had spent time in the various upscale wine houses as a lauded sommelier.  He had offered his services free of charge, not because of any altruistic desire to lend enjoyment to others, but because the thought of accepting money from ill-bred, dirty-eared inferiors was incredibly gauche.  Malfoys had wealth beyond the imagining.  They need never work at all if they so chose.  He had done it because it was power.  Subtle, unnoticed by all but the most erudite, but incredibly potent.  With his urbane polish and gilded tongue, he convinced the richest, most influential wizards in the world to imbibe nearly impotable filth.  And like it.  He hadn't even needed the Imperius Curse.  Just his soft, mellifluous voice, cold grey eyes, and absolute conviction.

     It had amused him a great deal to see posh Mudblood business wizards stuffing their florid, porcine faces with three hundred Galleon beefsteaks and quaffing glass after glass of wretched swill while they boasted to their companions of their sophistication.  He had watched them and smiled, knowing that soon enough, all pretensions would fall away before the unavoidable light of truth.

     On his last night as a sommelier in _Le Chateau Nocturne_, an exclusive restaurant patroned by the nouveau riche of wizarding society, he had systematically poisoned the entire wine cellar.  A thousand bottles of wine over the next six hours.  It was a slow-acting toxin, a concoction procured from Severus, and that night, the wine flowed like a sweet red river, pressed into eager hands by the gracious sommelier.  It was such a successful evening that the management served complimentary glasses to everyone.  The happy customers lurched out the doors, filled with wine and merriment.  It was the last door through which any of them ever passed.  They were all dead by dawn.

     The Ministry was understandably upset.  One hundred and twenty-seven of its most prominent citizens were dead, and there was no explanation.  They were found in their beds by husbands, wives, children, or house elves, or they keeled over before the astonished, dismayed faces of Mediwizards.  Medical scans showed no sign of foul play, though several demonstrated cataclysmic hardening of the arteries that would have killed them within months anyway.  Severus' work had been flawless.  Ministry health officials closed the restaurant, and the owner committed suicide.  The case had left many scratching their heads in disbelief.

     _If only someone had bothered to check the Ministry business permits.  My, my._

     He took a sip of brandy, tapping his finger lightly against the tumbler.  Oh, yes, how quickly the mystery would unravel then.  Businesses filing petitions to allow Muggles into their premises just couldn't be allowed to continue.  Pureblood citizens had to be protected from such filth.  Yes, ten Purebloods had died in the mass poisoning, and it was lamentable, but collateral damage was to be expected.

     Now, Harry Potter had fallen ill, much like the victims of the mass poisoning eighteen years before.  Severus' doing, without a doubt.  The man, grubby and unkempt as he was, was a brilliant Potions Master.  Even at nineteen, he had been more skilled in the simmering alchemy of the cauldron than anyone Lucius had ever known.  So single-minded.  When he was brewing, nothing else mattered.  The world was no larger than the bubbling mouth of his kettle.  He had never made a mistake.

     The question was, why had he done it now?  Did he sense the Dark Lord's growing dissatisfaction with him?  At one time, his Lordship had considered him an indispensable member of the inner circle, but of late, had had grown weary of his favorite pet.  Severus' returns had steadily diminished over the last year.  Where once had had provided them with invaluable information about Dumbledore's movements, his reports now consisted of inane pitter concerning the everyday operation of the school and vague mutterings about _possible_ Order activity.  Nothing concrete for the past six months.  His welcome with the Death Eaters was nearing its end.

     If he was responsible for killing Harry, it would buy him time.  A year at most.  But it wouldn't spare his life.  Nothing would.  Lord Voldemort prized loyalty above all, and it was evident that Severus' allegiance was divided.  What had started as infiltration of Hogwarts and the Order by a Death Eater spy had become a game of one upmanship between two ancient rivals, and Severus' fealty had clearly shifted to Dumbledore over the past five years.  

     The first hairline cracks in his heretofore solid foundation had appeared in Draco's first year.  He had dogged the pawn Quirrell's every step, thwarting his attempts to do away with the beloved wunderkind.  He had even possessed the bald audacity to counter a direct attempt by his Lordship to topple the brat from his broom.  His formerly eloquent reports had become terse, evasive, and wholly uninformative.  Lucius had seen the seeds of doubt taking root behind Lord Voldemort's eyes when he spoke of his former protégé, and the long road to Severus' ruin had unfurled.

     His fate had been sealed when he had not joined others after the Tri-wizard Tournament.  Lord Voldemort had summoned him, but he had not come, and his disobedience had cut his Lordship to the quick.  He could not love, could feel nothing but hatred and cold greed, but he considered Severus a valuable asset, and his loss before they were finished with him had made His Lordship look weak, unable to control his agents.  That was unacceptable.

     So Severus would die.  When or how had not yet been decided, but _who_ had never been in any doubt.  When the order was given, he, Lucius, would be the one to carry it out.  Bellatrix, though she was just as loyal as himself, was too emotional.  She would never do it cleanly.  Her emotions would overrule her caution, and in her zeal to make the traitor suffer, to exact the requisite pound of flesh, she might offer him the opportunity for escape, and someone who knew so much about their intricate hierarchy in enemy hands and willing to divulge everything would be an unmitigated disaster.  

     So the deed would fall to him, and he would do it well.  It would not be quick, but it would be clean, and when he left, there would be no doubt that Severus Snape was dead.  Or that he had suffered mightily.  He could impart untold agony to any limb he wished, separate tendon from bone with a flick of the wrist.  He could inflict a thousand wounds and still keep his victim alive.  For days, if he wished.  Before Severus' eyes looked upon the world for the last time, his every nerve ending would know the terrible, delirious ecstasy of unending pain.

     Draco would be disappointed.  He idolized Severus.  Every holiday was filled with praise for his dour Head of House, an endless litany of platitudes that made Lucius' head throb like an impacted tooth.  Sandwiched between his twittering wife and his crowing son, he had often wondered if he were trapped in his personal hell, if he hadn't been killed in a skirmish and sent to his eternal reward.  The realization that his favorite teacher was a craven, slinking turncoat would rattle the boy, but it would also be a dose of badly needed reality.  For all his airs and carefully affected worldliness, he was ridiculously naïve.  The sooner he learned the unpleasant truths of the world, the better.

     He finished his tumbler of brandy, draining it in a single, long swallow.  He would worry about the boy later.  Lord Voldemort would want to be apprised of this immediately, and he wanted to be the one bearing the glad tidings.  The children of his associates had certainly written their fathers as well-that was, if those unfortunate cretins, Crabbe and Goyle, could write-and the messenger of such glad news would be well rewarded.  He set the empty glass on the counter, grabbed his mink-lined velvet cloak, and Disapparated.

     Far away from Malfoy Manor, but still precariously close to the looming abyss where Lord Voldemort bided his time, Cornelius Fudge, Minister of Magic polished his gold nameplate.  He drew his wand in slow, lazy circles, guiding the soft cotton cloth.  He did this every morning and evening.  He liked order and cleanliness.  It was important to keep up appearances.  It wouldn't do for the Minister to have a shoddy office.  He was, after all, the representative of wizardry in Great Britain.  A strong front was imperative, even if reality was far different.

     "_Finite incantatem._"  The cloth fluttered to the desk and lay there, polish smeared like holy golden ichor across its wilted fabric.  He slipped his wand into his robes, straightened them, and sighed.

     Things were getting bad.  As much as he denied it, sequestered himself here in his opulent office, the creeping, pervasive rot of a decaying society had finally slithered beneath his closed mahogany door.  There were no wards or charms to keep it out.  The Information and Public Affairs Departments were working overtime to keep the worst quiet, but it was only a matter of time.  The more astute already sensed the disease festering beneath rosy cheeks, recognized the brightness in the eyes for what it was-the coming of an epidemic fever.  

     His eyes flickered to the overflowing memo tray on the edge of his immense cherry wood desk.  The _In_ tray was buried beneath an avalanche of papers, manila folders, and weighty dossiers, each one detailing some new horror or catastrophe.  He reached out and plucked the topmost folder from the teetering pile.  He flipped it open reluctantly, mouth puckering in an unconscious moue of distaste.  He was sure he didn't want to read this.  He never did these days.  

Incident Report 

**Magical Law Enforcement Squadron**

Missing Persons Division 

COMPLAINANT NAME:  Rosemary Tuffington

ADDRESS:  Flat 23D, Crowther Lane, Canterbury, Kent

TIME:  9:30p.m.

NATURE OF COMPLAINT:  At half past seven on 21 October, Rosemary Tuffington arrived at her flat to find the door ajar and pools of blood on the threshold.  She proceeded immediately to the neighboring flat and summoned MLES inspectors to the scene.

     Upon arriving, Aurors noted the blood.  Inside the flat, overturned chairs were discovered, as well as more blood.  A bloody handprint was found on the washbasin.  Broken crockery littered the floor.  Mrs. Tuffington informed inspectors that the flat had not been in this condition when she left it at approximately half past five to go to Haversham's Grocery(alibi currently being verified).

     Further investigation yielded more blood in the corridor leading to the master bedroom, as well as substantial blood in the secondary bedroom, which Mrs. Tuffington informed us, belonged to her son, Darius Tuffington, 9.  Torn bedsheets and ragged holes in the plaster indicated signs of struggle.

     When questioned, Mrs. Tuffington informed inspectors that both her son and her husband, Quintus, 41, had been home when she left, and neither expressed any intention of leaving the premises.  The family dog, Busky, is also unaccounted for.  

     After a thorough search of the premises and surrounding environs, no trace of the family was found.  Inspectors questioned other residents in adjoining flats, but none remembered seeing or hearing anything suspicious.  Inspectors noted that some of the residents appeared dazed and confused, as though they had been subjected to memory modification Charms and were taken to St. Mungo's for a thorough examination.

     An examination of the location determined that nothing of monetary value was taken.

DATE REPORTED FILED:  21/10/96

INSPECTOR IN CHARGE:  Creswell, Ian

CASE STATUS:  Unsolved

     He thumbed through the rest of the file, which consisted of addendums, recommendations, notice of filings, warrant issuances, and the like.  None of it was promising.  No new leads, sightings, or suspects.  No suspects at all, for that matter.  The only happening of significance was the discovery of a badly decomposed dog a week later.  Even that was uncertain; the dog might well have been a stray and not Busky at all.

     He closed the folder and tossed it atop the stack once more.  There were a dozen more just like it awaiting his attention, but right now, he hadn't the energy.  It was easy enough to read between the lines if he cared to.  Two missing people, a pool of blood, signs of struggle, and yet not a single neighbors hears a blasted thing.  And some of them seem a trifle…odd.  Like they've only just awakened from a very deep sleep.  Oh, yes, it was all so familiar.  So neat.

     He propped his elbows on the desk and scrubbed his face with his palms.  The Aurors read between the lines, too, and that was why the report was on his desk instead of crammed into an already overstuffed filing cabinet in the Missing Persons division.  It bore all the earmarks of a Death Eater attack.  The mere thought sent a cold ball of apprehension into the pit of his stomach.  That particular phrase hadn't been uttered within these walls in nearly fourteen years.  He had hoped never to hear it or consider it again, but there it was, floating in the roiling viscera of his mind like the bloated corpse of a black fly.  

     _It can't be_.  _Potter stopped all of that.  By hook or by crook or by some blessed magic we'll never understand, he banished the creeping darkness, vanquished it.  At long last, the nightmare, the siege, was over.  We could all breathe again.  It can't be back.  _He_ can't be back.  It wasn't just._

     During He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's reign, attacks and disappearances like that of Mr. Tuffington and his lad were commonplace.  The newspaper was rife with accounts of mysterious goings-on, heinous murders, and violent skirmishes between Aurors and supporters of the darkness.  People went home and never saw the sun again this side of heaven.  The streets had run red with blood, and the pungent odor of fear rose from the pavement in an intoxicating, simmering steam.

     Then Potter and his miracle, and with him, quiet.  Not the terrified, prayerful silence of those cowering in the dangerous darkness and hoping the deadly blight would pass them by, or the knowing quiet of those already doomed, but plain, simple silence.  The silence of relief.  The fortunate survivors had slowly emerged from the rubble, blinking warily into the sunlight with which they had been so recently reacquainted, moles crawling out of shattered burrows.  The business of rebuilding had begun.

     For a while, there had been random outbursts of resistance from diehard Death Eaters unable to accept the inevitable, but for the most part, the peace they had so fervently hoped for was at hand.  The fear of seeing the Dark Mark hovering over cottages and flats had lifted.  Gradually, as weeks passed and no one was found mangled in the streets, children resumed their play, their joyous cries piercing the air like phoenix song.  Muggle-born businesses that had been burned to smoldering ash arose anew, brighter and busier than before.  They had been pulled back from the yawning abyss just as gravity released its grudging hold, and they had been glad of it.

     Now, it was coming undone again, one thread at a time.

     _It can't be.  Maybe it isn't as it seems.  Surely there is another explanation.  Mustn't let myself get caught up in the needless hysteria that fool Dumbledore has been trying to stir up since the Tri-Wizard Tournament.  The death of the Diggory boy was most unfortunate, but it certainly wasn't the work of…  Everyone knew the Tournament carried a risk.  Diggory was a regrettable loss.  The Potter boy was understandably hysterical.  It's a wonder he didn't see dancing penguins in lace tutus.  It's entirely possible that he accidentally killed young Cedric and concocted the story about the return of You-Know-Who to cover his tracks._

     Stranger things had happened, especially when lives and futures were at stake.  He wouldn't be at all surprised if Dumbledore had coached Potter to spread those pernicious lies.  There had been rumblings for years that he might be interested in the Minister's position.  He denied it, of course, but that was poppycock.  Fudge himself had made the same denial less than a week before declaring his candidacy.  It was indecorous to appear overly covetous.

     Ex-Gryffindor or not, Albus Dumbledore could be cunning as Slytherin when it suited him.  Just look at the cracking job he had done in keeping the more unsavory doings at Hogwarts under wraps.  Honestly, he was convinced he would never know half the things the old charlatan had done within those venerable walls.  Undermining his, Fudge's, position and good standing with the public by insisting that You-Know-Who had returned was just the sort of devious ploy in which he would engage.  Dumbledore liked to muddy the waters, but he loathed getting grit on his hands.

     For fifteen years, he, Cornelius Fudge, Minister of Magic, had governed the wizarding world, shepherding them through the hard-earned peace, leading them to unprecedented prosperity.  He had maintained the status quo.  For fifteen years, there had been no panic, no fear, no hysteria, only a logy, bucolic peace.  A peace for which he was responsible, and now Dumbledore was working hard to turn those achievements to his advantage.

     He had been waging his little smear campaign for years, though now he was becoming more emboldened.  Five years ago, his surreptitious attacks had come in the guise of well-planted rumors that the Ministry used him as a crutch, a sounding board past which they ran most of their most pressing proposals before making a decision.  Codswallop.  While it was true that the old man had been consulted in the early days of the Fudge administration, those meetings had been little more than courtesy calls, good-form honors bestowed on him for his faithful service to their world.  He had never unduly influenced the governance of the country.  All weighty decisions were his alone.

     But Dumbledore had such a groundswell of popular support that most chose to believe the rumors rather than the evidence before their own eyes and his impeccable record as Minister.  Much of that had to do with Dumbledore's public persona.  What was not to love about an affable loon with a penchant for sweets and a hideously unabashed sense of fashion.  It didn't hurt that the eccentric fellow was a beloved war hero largely credited with defeating Grindewald.

     By contrast, he didn't have much to offer.  He was merely Cornelius Augustine Fudge, portly, congenitally underachieving son of landed gentry.  He'd had no Dark Lord to cast him headlong into prominence.  He'd fought for every scrap of recognition and acclaim, suffering through the inane and grossly expensive dinner parties thrown by wealthy socialites, glad-handing and fraternizing with the best of them.  Cheeks on both sides of the line of demarcation had been kissed with feigned fervor, and all of that had brought him all of this.  His diligence and skill at crafting connections and contacts in the relevant sectors had paid dividends, ones he wouldn't surrender on behalf of unfounded hysteria.

     _You hold this seat because Albus Dumbledore refused to run for election._

     He stiffened in his chair, his hand curling into a tight fist.  Blood rushed to his cheeks, staining them with indignation.  _That_ was patently untrue, and he had proven it time and again.  Had Dumbledore chosen to run, he would have defeated him.  It would have been a ferocious contest-of that there was no doubt-but in the end, the people would have chosen him all the same.  He projected stability and intellect and respectability.  Dumbledore was an eccentric loon who traipsed about in blinding robes and fuzzy bunny slippers and spouted esoteric nonsense.

     He told himself this day after day, but he could never make himself believe it.  Not entirely.  Each time he thought he had banished the doubt, it returned, whispering in his ear, its sickly-sweet breath crawling over his flesh.  He could not rid himself of it, any more than he could banish the folders that foretold the fall of his well-ordered world from his desk.

     _Oh, yes.  That I can do._

He grabbed the folder he had just placed atop the mountain in his inbox, jerked open the bottom drawer of his desk, and shoved it inside.  He started to close the drawer, paused, then picked up another handful of folders and shoved them in, too.  He slammed the door shut, his heart hammering in his chest.  His hands were slick and clammy, and he fought the urge to go to the wet bar and pour himself a drink.  It was too early in the day, and he needed a clear mind.

     Out of sight, but not out of mind.  The sight of the folders still lingered in his thoughts, their ominous message drifting through the pores of the wood in a noxious cloud.  He tried to push them away, but they resisted, growing brighter.  He scowled.

     _Damn them._

     He pulled a folder from the pile and flipped it open.  Work would distract him.  He could lose himself in the numbing banality of bureaucracy, drown in the indecipherable legalese.  He looked down and spluttered at what he saw.

     Moody was submitting a request to St. Mungo's for a bezoar.  He snorted.  That was one bit of normality this morning.  The man had suspected poison in his porridge for sixty years.  Not a day went by when he wasn't Flooing overworked Aurors about some suspicious noises or skulking figure outside his privet hedge.  Nowadays, the reports were largely ignored, and in the event they couldn't be, a green trainee was dispatched to look into it and told to throw away the report.  

     He closed the report and stuffed it in the outbox.  That would go to the furnace.  There was precious little money in the Ministry coffers, and he wasn't going to waste a single Knut soothing Moody's delusions.  That decided, his mind returned to the files in his bottom drawer.  The files he wished would disappear.

     _It won't help.  There are three hundred more in the basement.  Swallowed by dust and shadows, but there all the same.  You couldn't make them go away._

     He grunted, wishing for that drink again.  The ten years' worth of unexplained disappearances and murders crumbling in the Ministry sub-basement was the last thing he needed to ponder.  They made him profoundly uneasy, hinted that perhaps the wizarding world was not on solid ground.  

     _Coincidences, surely.  Unfortunate tragedies.  No more than that._

_     Some, maybe, but not all.  Not by a long chalk.  There are too many, and about some, there could be no doubt.  You know the ones._

     He could see them in his mind's eye, the folders marked _Urgent and Classified _in glowing red letters.  Two hundred and twelve of them, each containing photos so graphic that veterans of thirty years could not stomach them.  Ritual murders involving barbarities not seen since Voldemort's reign.  The reality of the crimes existed only in the basements.  Outside these walls, the families were told their loved ones had been victims of random violence.  The more stubborn had their memories modified.  In the name of national security, of course.  It wouldn't do to have them raising a hue and cry in the streets or the press about marauding Death Eaters. 

     He ignored the tapping at first.  It was probably the Weasley boy delivering more private and urgent correspondence or chafing to bring him "important news."  News which usually turned out to be inconsequential tidbits first reported a week earlier.  The boy's ambition was laudable, but his ties to Arthur Weasley were a detriment.  The man was far too ingratiated to Dumbledore for the younger Weasley to be of any real value.  Despite his vehement protestations that he had severed ties with his boorish clan, there always remained the possibility of reconciliation.  And he'd be damned if he would hand Dumbledore another tool.

     When it persisted, he swiveled his chair and was astonished to see an owl fluttering madly in the drop slot that led from the surface to his office.  The tiny grey creature twittered and hooted mournfully, beating its wings against the sides of the tube.  Around its leg was fastened a letter.

     _Stupid bird.  Why didn't it just drop the bloody thing down the chute?_

     He arose and went to the window that opened to his mail chute.  The word "window" was a misnomer; it actually looked on nothing more then the shale and clay seventy feet below ground.  The illusion of sunlight was added to increase productivity.  He lifted the latch and grabbed the owl, wincing as it nipped him.

     "I'm not going to hurt you," he snapped, depositing it onto the desk and bringing his wounded finger to his lips.

     The owl hopped impatiently, jabbing its taloned foot at him and chittering indignantly, large, golden eyes fixing him with a put-upon glower.

     "All right, you impertinent little beast," he hissed.  He tore the letter from its proffered leg, ignoring its startled hoot.

     The first time he read the letter, he couldn't believe it.  The second time, he was smiling when he finished.  By the third, he was whistling.  Glee suffused him, slow, sweet poison.  All his problems had just been solved.  He stowed the letter in his robes and left the office at a brisk stride.  He couldn't believe his luck.

     Albus Dumbledore's machinations had caught up with him at last. 


	28. In the Absence of Light Comes the Darkne...

Chapter Twenty-Eight

     Albus Dumbledore sat in his office, composing yet another letter to the headmistress of D.A.I.M.S. regarding the acquisition of the house elf, Dinks.  The matter was proving to be stickier than expected.  Madam Donnelly was reluctant to part with "a valuable commodity like Dinks."  Polite insinuations of "a spirit of goodwill and cooperation" had been ignored.  A proposal to exchange one elf for another was likewise dismissed as "untenable."  Something about the time and expense required to properly train a house elf for specialized care.

     That last was a diplomatic way of saying that she couldn't be bothered to make the necessary arrangements, especially not without financial compensation.  House elves were bright creatures that could be easily trained for highly specialized tasks.  They served as orderlies and patient caregivers at St.Mungo's.  Winky, bless her little soul, had cared for Rebecca Stanhope in spectacular fashion, with nary a misstep.

     _Well, her duties at the Crouch estate may have had a hand in that._

     They may have, indeed.  Winky had been absolutely mum on her precise job description with the Crouches.  The only thing she would offer on the subject was that Mr. Barty needed her to take care of him.  For years, they had thought that "Mr. Barty" referred to Bartemius Crouch, Sr., but after the Tri-Wizard Tournament, it was clear that her "Barty" had been Bartemius Crouch, Jr., convicted Death Eater.  He and others had pressed her for details constantly, but to no avail.  She simply stopped her ears, barricaded herself in the kitchen pantries, and drowned in butterbeer.

     So he would make one last try for Dinks.  As much as he hated to do it, he would offer to buy him.  Money often opened pathways diplomacy by itself could not.  Though he wasn't certain how much to offer.  Placing value on life was not his custom, and thinking of a house elf in terms of Galleons, Sickles, and Knuts was difficult.  They were an indispensable part of his staff, and their cheerful dispositions never failed to buoy his spirits.  No price could be assigned to that.  Or to the affection a young girl placed on her companion.

     He had never had to purchase a house elf before.  Those currently living at Hogwarts had either been there when he took the Headmaster's position or come of their own volition since.  Even in his youth, his family never ran short of them.  They were exceptionally long-lived and twice as fecund, though measures had been taken to control population growth.  The Pureblood families usually sterilized all but a handful of their servants.  A pregnant house elf was a useless house elf as far as they were concerned.

     The entire process made him uneasy, but that was neither here nor there.  House elf civil rights was the cause of Miss Granger and wholly irrelevant to the task at hand.  Namely procuring Dinks on behalf of Miss Stanhope.  He mulled over several possible offers, rejecting them as either too high or too low.  Finally he settled on one hundred Galleons.  He scribbled the figure on the parchment embossed with the Hogwarts crest, signed his name in immaculate, flowing script, and put down his quill.  He was just reaching for the wax with which to seal it when there came a sharp rap upon his door.

     "Come in," he called.

     The door swung open to reveal the grave, smug figure of Cornelius Fudge, and his stomach lurched.  He knew the man would be coming sooner or later, but he had hoped he wouldn't arrive until after dinner.  He needed more time to prepare, marshal his forces.  He had no doubt Fudge would make things as miserable as possible.  Since their bitter parting of the ways at the end of the Tri-Wizard Tournament, Fudge had quietly been doing everything he could to discredit him, undermine his influence with the integral governing bodies.  Just before the start of term, the members of the Wizengamot had voted him out as Chief Warlock, a post he had held for twenty-five years.  Though the official reason for the ouster had been that the other members felt he had enough duties to perform here at the school, the real motives weren't hard to decipher.  

     Fudge was quite comfortable in his job as Minister and fond of all the prestige and power afforded by it.  It was his crowning glory, the one deed that held him above the mundane insignificance of his shabbily aristocratic family, and he was ever convinced that someone was trying the wrest the golden scepter from his hands.  Someone craftier, more skulduggerous, richer, or more ruthless than he.  Fears of inadequacy riddled him like contagion, and he used every means at his disposal to ensure that no one usurped him.

     In truth, he was not an extraordinarily adept leader.  He was too busy assuring his continued dominion to truly tend to the world in his care.  The inveterate cunning instrumental in winning him power dissipated when confronted by unforgiving reality.  He was a creature of boardrooms and flattering press conferences, not the battlefield.  What he could not conquer, he ignored, mopping his perpetually florid brow and praying it would go away.  

     Voldemort was a case in point.  In his heart, the heart unencumbered by political machinations, he knew the truth, but it was a truth too daunting for him to bear, and so he did as he had always done when faced with a problem that could not be absolved or beaten down by a memo or surreptitious reparation.  He denied it, decried it as loudly as he could, hoping, by sheer stridency, to ward off the inevitable.  He would hold that fool's course until the end, until everything was smoldering ash and bitter lamentation. 

     For reasons he had never understood, Fudge was certain he was after his position, that he was using Hogwarts as a stronghold of covert resistance and inculcating its students with subversive desires to topple the Fudge regime.  All pretty poppycock.  The Minister of Magic was the one title he had _no_ desire to hold.  He loved his children, loved the freedom the venerable old school offered him to be as cracked as he pleased.  He wanted nothing more than to spend his remaining years in quiet serenity, pondering matters no more pressing than how many geese to order for the Boxing Day Feast.

     Political ambitions were for the young and spry, not those sailing into winter twilight.  He was too old to shoulder any more burdens.  He wasn't even sure he could handle those with which he was already entrusted.  He certainly hadn't handled Harry as he should have.  The mere thought of the nightmare that boy's life had become through his gross mishandling made him ill with regret.  He shuddered to think of the inadvertent damage he could inflict on an entire society.

     _Selling yourself short, Albus?  There are many who would say you've done more than well by this world._

_     Yes, well, they've not seen what I've cost Harry._

_     It wasn't your fault._

_     Yes, it was.  I should have known, should have insisted on being the Secret Keeper.  If I had, none of this would have been necessary._

     You don't know that.  Voldemort might still have found them in the end.  James was as brash and impetuous as Harry is.  He would've gone to the fight eventually.  The fire burned too brightly in him.  The past is done.  What matters now is finding out what really happened here and making sure an innocent man doesn't hang.

"Ah, Minister, how good to see you, though I must confess your visit comes as a bit of a surprise," he said, rising from his chair.

     "Good afternoon, Albus," Fudge answered, and though he was smiling, it was not pleasant.  It was humorless and predatory.  "May I sit?"

     "Of course."  He gestured to the chair before his desk.

     "I'm afraid this isn't a social call," Fudge said, settling himself into the chair.

     "Oh?"  Dumbledore arched an eyebrow and pushed his spectacles onto the bridge of his nose.

     "I received a letter this morning from a parent who had been told by their child of an incident in Potions," he said gravely, steepling his pudgy fingers over his mouth and nose.

     "Would you like a drink, Minster Fudge?"  The Headmaster gestured to the assortment of decanters behind him.

     "What?  Oh, erm, yes, thank you," Fudge muttered.  He had clearly anticipated a much stronger reaction to the news he bore.

     "Splendid.  I prefer scotch.  And your vice?"

     "Cognac if you have it."  Fudge flapped his hand impatiently.

     "Excellent," Dumbledore said placidly, reaching for the tumblers beside the liquor.  "This incident-what does it involve?" he asked, though he knew perfectly well what and _who _Fudge meant.

     "You mean you don't know?"  He gave an incredulous snort.  "I thought you might have guessed."

     "There are any number of incidents during a school day-inter-House skirmishes, flying mishaps, romantic liaisons in the broom cupboards-Filch reported three cases of the latter in just the past two days.  Most are resolved by the Heads of House of the interested parties, but they do get passed on eventually."  He passed the cognac to Fudge and took a thoughtful sip of his scotch.

     Fudge was staring at him in numb incredulity.  He took a long swallow of cognac, and then said, "Stop playing games.  You know very well what I'm talking about.  There was an incident in Potions with Harry Potter five days ago."

     "Ah, yes.  That one."  He took another sip of scotch.  "I assure you everything is being done to investigate the matter."

     "Is it?  I wonder," Fudge said softly, circling his forefinger around the smooth rim of the glass.  "Where is Potter now?"

     "In the infirmary.  Madam Pomfrey has been working diligently to bring him around."

     "Any progress?"

     "Regrettably, no.  His condition remains absolutely unchanged."  He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose before his thumb and forefinger.

     Though he had been working hard to maintain a composed façade in front of Fudge, his sorrow was genuine.  He had gone to visit Harry every evening after dinner, hoping to see signs of improvement, but his prayers had gone unanswered.  He was as lifeless as ever, the scant bloom of health with which he'd started the term withering into a wintry pallor.  Madam Pomfrey poured nutritive potions down his unresisting throat three times a day, but despite her efforts, Harry grew thinner.  His cheeks, always thin, were hollow, and his shoulder blades jutted painfully from beneath the thin fabric of his robes.  Harry was wasting away.

     Part of him wanted to stay away from the infirmary and the small, lost boy swallowed up by crisp linens.  Seeing Harry that way was nearly too much.  He never stayed long, and he never touched him.  He was afraid that if he did, his tremulous fingers would scrape waxy skin away to reveal his own long-hidden guilts and failures etched into the boy's sinew.  But he always went.  It had been his responsibility to protect Harry, and now that he had so spectacularly failed in that, he owed it to him to visit him each night, if only to bear witness to what his laxity had caused.

     He often wondered if Harry was quietly taking inventory of the wounds inflicted by his guardians.  How would things look in the end, when the blood-scented smoke cleared and the last foe was vanquished?  Would he deem all the horrendous sacrifice worth the cost?  When the ledger was balanced, what would Harry find?  Would he forgive a tired old man his blunders?  He didn't see how Harry could.  Some were beyond salvaging.  

     "Any idea as to what caused this?" Fudge asked, polishing off the cognac.

     "Professor Snape examined the phial shards this morning and detected cyanide.  A subsequent search and accounting of his stores revealed that a lethal amount of the substance was missing."

     The Minister's eyes gleamed with sudden interest, and he sat forward in his chair.  "I was under the impression that such dangerous chemicals were segregated from the rest, kept in a secure cabinet."

     "They are."

     "Then how did this happen?"  The malevolent smile had returned.

     "We're not yet certain," Dumbledore said calmly.

     Fudge leaned back in his chair.  "I want to see Professor Snape."

     "Of course."

     "At once."

     "Alas, I'm afraid that will not be possible."  Dumbledore sipped his scotch.

     "And why is that?"  Fudge, who had been lazily rolling the empty glass between his hands, froze, eyes narrowing with suspicion.

     "Because Professor Snape is in the middle of afternoon lessons," the Headmaster responded cheerfully.

     Fudge sputtered in inarticulate fury, slamming the empty tumbler onto the desk.  Dumbledore plucked it from the desktop and returned it to where it belonged.  Then he Conjured a cloth and dabbed at the wet ring it had left behind.

     "There now," he murmured absently, inspecting his handiwork.

     "A student in your care, _the_ student in your care lies in the Hospital Wing, and all you can say is, 'there now'?"  Fudge had gone an ugly red.

     "One must pay attention to the details before he can grapple with the larger problem at hand."  Dumbledore was smiling, but there was no amusement in his voice.

     "I don't know what you're driving at," Fudge hissed, "but I'll have you know that I am well aware of how to confront a crisis."

     "Oh, indeed.  You've handled Voldemort most admirably," he offered drily.

     "Handled Vol-there is nothing to handle.  He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is _gone_, Albus.  He was destroyed fifteen years ago," he snarled, but Dumbledore thought he detected a hint of plea in the statement.

     "His body was destroyed, yes, but his essence survived, and last year Harry saw him live again."  The Headmaster's voice was soothing and matter-of-fact.

     "Balderdash," snapped Fudge.  "He saw Cedric Diggory die before his very eyes in a terrible accident, and the trauma made him hysterical.  He saw what he wanted to see."

     "I have no doubt that it was distressing for Harry to witness his classmate's death, but I have known him a very long time, and he has never been hysterical."

     "People have their limits."

     "Of course, but Harry had no reason to lie about what he saw.  He's faced Voldemort three times before.  I'm certain he can recognize him."

     "Stop saying that name!" Fudge bellowed.  

     "Why?  If he is truly gone, surely no harm can come of it," Dumbledore said mildly.

     "Has it ever occurred to you, Albus, that your Golden Child might have killed Diggory himself and invented the He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named story to absolve himself?"  

     "Absolutely not.  I trust Harry implicitly."

     "Why?  Because of his name?"

     "Because he has never given me reason not to."

     "I am telling you, Albus, _He_ is not back.  I don't give a fig what fairy tale that boy has told you."  He punctuated his words by pounding his meaty fist on the corner of the desk.

     "Do you truly believe that, Cornelius?"  Dumbledore asked softly.

     Fudge flinched as though struck.  His mouth worked soundlessly, and after several fruitless moments of trying to forge coherent syllables from shocked disbelief, he closed it with a snap.

     Dumbledore sat in his chair and waited and watched.  Fudge's answer would determine the course of things hereafter.  He prayed for miraculous reason, for Fudge to admit what he surely must know in the places where the creature known as Politician could not yet reach, in his bones and in his heart.  He had been a decent boy in his youth, ambitious but earnest.  Perhaps a remnant of the child who could and would accept the truth when it came to him, no matter how unpalatable, lingered inside the necessary skeptic he had become.

     Fudge sat with his face cradled in his hands for a very long time, his elbows propped upon his knees.  Dumbledore sipped his scotch, listening to the faint sounds of his breath behind his hands and Fawkes' brilliant, dry feathers rustling as he preened.  Then Fudge raised his eyes, and for a single moment, he thought he saw acceptance in them, but when he blinked, the expression cleared, replaced by the terrible, familiar anger and suspicion.

     "You think I'll fall for those mind games, do you?"  Fudge jabbed an accusatory finger at him.  "Well, I won't!"  His mouth twisted in a vicious, unbalanced leer.  "I'm not some impressionable boy to whom you can feed your codswallop."

     Dumbledore closed his eyes for the briefest instant, the unconscious breath he had been holding escaping through his nose, and when he opened them again, Fudge was still gazing at him with manic intensity.

     "Then I cannot help you, Cornelius."  His voice was mournful, heavy with undesired knowledge.

     "I don't want your help.  I want to speak to Professor Snape."  He spat the name and the title that preceded it, his tongue black with scorn.

     "As I have told you, Professor Snape is in the middle of his afternoon lessons," Dumbledore answered patiently.

     "I don't care if he's in the middle of his blasted wedding; I want to see him _now._  I'm the Minister of Magic!"

     "As you so often remind me," Dumbledore said blandly.  "Be that as it may, _I _am Headmaster of Hogwarts until such time as the Board of Governors sees fit to remove me, and I will not disrupt my pupils' education without reason."

     "That can certainly be arranged," Fudge said softly.

     Dumbledore arched a bushy eyebrow, its snowy arc peeking above his half-moon spectacles.  "Perhaps.  You were _most _persuasive with the Wizengamot."

     Fudge inclined his head as though accepting a compliment.  "Indeed."

     "However," Dumbledore continued, "I'm afraid you may find the school governors an entirely different matter.  Particularly now that Lucius Malfoy has been dismissed."

     Fudge suddenly colored an alarming puce.  "Mr. Malfoy is an upstanding member of society and a generous supporter of various charitable causes."

     "Including your campaign fund," Dumbledore agreed.

     "What of it?"  Fudge snapped.

     "Nothing.  Though I'm sure your constituents would be quite interested in exactly how much time Mr. Malfoy spends in the Minister's office."

     "He has a fine mind."

     "And deep pockets.  Lucre from his days as a Death Eater?"

     "He wasn't in possession of his faculties; he was under the Imperius Curse.  Court records are there for the taking if you don't believe me."

     "Oh, I remember perfectly well.  I was at his trial, if you recall.  Most riveting testimony."

     "What has any of this got to do with the Wizengamot?" Fudge demanded.

     "Not a whit, likely," Dumbledore conceded.  "Though I found it quite interesting that soon after my removal from the Wizengamot, numerous members were blessed with donations of support to their favorite causes.  Gifts from the Malfoy estate."

     "Malfoy is a generous man."  Fudge's eyes darted around the room, and he was tugging impulsively on the midriff of his robes.

     "Indeed.  Unfortunately, after his rancorous departure from the Board of Governors, I daresay his magnanimity will be most unimpressive as far as they are concerned."

     Comprehension dawned on Fudge's face.  "I don't know what you're playing at, but I'd have a care."  His voice was quivering with barely suppressed anger.

     "I've lived a very long time, Cornelius; I'd say prudence is one of my few virtues."

     "Good," Fudge replied shortly.  "No more delays.  I want to see Professor Snape."

     "I believe we've already discussed this."

     A nasty smile crept across Fudge's face, a furtive, knowing smirk that made the skin on the nape of Dumbledore neck prickle.  Fudge was possessed of stupid cunning, and if he was wearing such a pleased expression, it meant that he had a plan that could come to no good in the end.  He took a sip of scotch to fortify himself and waited.

     "I'd rather hoped you would cooperate," Fudge muttered sorrowfully, clucking and shaking his head.  He sighed heavily, and then the unpleasant smile resurfaced.  "However, since you refuse to see things my way, you leave me no choice.  If you won't summon him, I'm afraid I'll have to fetch him."

     "Oh?"  The Headmaster's face was serene, but his mind was racing.  "I'm not certain Professor Snape will welcome your intrusion."

     "Doubtless not, but I never said anything about intruding.  I'll leave that to them."  He sounded almost merry as he pointed to the doorway.

     Dumbledore followed his finger and saw two Aurors and a squat, toady woman standing there.  One of the Aurors, he noted with relief, was Kingsley Shacklebolt.  The other was a wan, thin-lipped fellow named Dawlish, a staunch Ministry man who would follow orders to the last, logic and decency be damned.  He felt the crème fresh he'd dolloped on his griddle cakes this morning curdle in his stomach.  He remembered the woman from Wizengamot meetings, but he couldn't recall what she had done there.  She hadn't been a magistrate.

     "Bit drastic, don't you think?" Dumbledore asked, adjusting his spectacles.

     "You brought things to this."

     "You're being rash.  School mishaps are generally handled internally."

     "School mishap?" Fudge sputtered, the triumphant smile fading.  "Is that what you call this?  The boy collapsed in the care of a former Death Eater after taking a potion left in his trust."

     "A reformed Death Eater," Dumbledore corrected mildly.

     "There is no such thing," Fudge snapped.

     "Then perhaps you should send Aurors for Lucius Malfoy, as I believe he confessed."

     "He's an exception."

     "Naturally."

     "Enough.  Take me to him, or they fetch him."  He jabbed a finger at the waiting Aurors.

     "Very well, Cornelius."  When Fudge puffed out his chest like a bandy rooster, his mouth once more regaining its supercilious grin, Dumbledore held up his hand.  "However, I would like to finish my scotch, if you don't mind."

     A suspicious cough sounded from Kingsley, who discreetly covered his mouth with his loosely fisted hand.

     "Finish your-," Fudge began, but trailed off in consternation.

     "The dungeons are frightfully cold and damp, especially at this time of year.  I find a nip keeps the frost at bay."

     "Yes, yes, just finish the ruddy thing," Fudge ordered, throwing up his hands and plopping into his seat in disgust.

     "As quickly as I can," Dumbledore assured him, and then he proceeded to take a dainty sip from the still half-full tumbler, prompting another alarming snuffle from Kingsley.

     "What the devil is the matter with you?" Fudge snapped, rounding on his subordinate.

     "My apologies, Minister, I'm allergic to bird dander," Kingsley replied smoothly, drawing a long ebony finger beneath his nose.

     "Ah, well, then."  Fudge tugged at his robes and seemed to consider something.  "Be quiet about it."

     "Yes, Minister."

     He turned to the Headmaster again, and his eyes narrowed when he saw that no appreciable progress had been made on the contents of the tumbler.

     Seeing the direction of his scrutiny, Dumbledore took another sip.  "I'm long past the age of quaffing.  Goes to my head, and we wouldn't want an accident on the stairs."

     Fudge nodded in agreement, but he was nearly apoplectic with ill-concealed impatience.  He eyes bulged from their sockets, and his fingers were clasped so tightly behind his back that they shook.  Over his shoulder, Dumbledore caught sight of Kingsley biting surreptitiously on the inside of his cheek.

     Kingsley may have found his tacit hedging comical, but he was doing it to prevent disaster.  Severus, for all his outward dignity and stoicism, was very sensitive, fragile in the face of imminent degradation.  Should Fudge and the Aurors go barging unannounced and uninvited into his classroom and his haven, things could sour in a moment.  He clung to his soiled honor with both hands and every ounce of his will, and he would _never_ let himself be arrested in front of his pupils.  He had his limits.

     He took another nip of the smooth, burning liquid, unconsciously savoring the warmth that bloomed in his chest.  He was suddenly keenly aware of the brittleness of his bones.  He thought he could feel his ribs shudder each time his heart beat.  His shoulders and knees were stiff and frozen with age and unexpected worry, and the dull throb of arthritis sank its teeth into his wrists.  He quietly flexed the fingers of his free hand, careful to conceal it in the abetting folds of his robes.  In his agitated state, Cornelius was apt to interpret the slightest move as illicit subterfuge.

     This was a fine mess.  Fudge was boorish and blustering, and he would be wholly unconcerned with his Potions Master's temperament; even if he were attuned to it, it was unlikely he would care.  He was interested only in how his grand entrance would make him look, the awe it would inspire in the students.  He would have it known that he was indisputably the Minister of Magic.  He would strut and preen, each step and smirk a blow to the oft-scalded pride of Severus, and there would be no sympathy in his eyes when he crushed the last vestiges of his dignity beneath his pompous heel.

     He never mentioned it to Severus-or anyone else-but he suspected that Severus' sanity was perched on a very precarious fulcrum, directly tied to his perception of himself and his surety of place in Hogwarts and the world at large.  If what little he had earned and made for himself were torn from him, the darkness against which he was constantly struggling would gobble him up and leave nothing behind.  His eventual pardon by trial would be irrelevant.  A shell bearing his face would walk and breathe and void, but Severus Snape, the part that he had been trying for seventeen years to save, would die.

     He watched the other occupants of his office over the rim of his tumbler.  Fudge was pacing to and fro, casting frequent, black looks in his direction.  Dawlish was rooted uncomfortably beside Fawkes' golden perch, his hand throttling his beechnut wand.  Large, greasy beads of sweat trickled down his mottled forehead.  On the other side of the perch was Kingsley.  He alone seemed at ease, his hands clasped loosely in front of him as he admired the hundred of portraits of former Headmasters that lined the walls.

     The squat woman, too, was looking around, but there was an avarice in her eyes that unsettled him.  It was as though she were cataloging every picture, book and gadget and assigning a value, calculating its worth to the last Knut.  She lingered over the bronze astrolabe, letting her puffy fingers crawl over it like the legs of a malingering spider.  Her eyes roved longingly over the priceless volumes that lined his bookshelves.

     "Such a lovely office," she crooned, bringing a doughy, ring-encrusted hand to her neck in what was obviously intended as a gesture of innocent admiration.

     "I quite agree," Dumbledore replied.  "I'm most fond of it."

     "I'm sure you are," grunted Fudge, who was clearly far from enamored with it.

     Dumbledore said nothing, excusing his silence with yet another sip of scotch.  Anything he said now would only antagonize him further, and he wanted to buy Severus as much time as possible.  The hourglass on the edge of his desk told him the afternoon Potions lesson still had fifteen minutes to go.  The scotch might win him another five.  After that, he'd have to rely on his creativity to milk the other ten.  With any luck, they'd reach the Potions classroom just as the students were dismissed, and there wouldn't be a curious audience to witness the sordid spectacle.  

     The scotch disappeared all too soon, and the instant he set the empty tumbler on his desk, Fudge straightened and clapped his hands together authoritatively. 

     "Excellent!  Let's be off, then."  He started toward the door without waiting for acknowledgement.

     Resigning himself to the fact that there could be no further delay, the Headmaster followed in his wake, casting a surreptitious glance at Kingsley as he went.  He saw apprehension in the other man's face, tight lines of worry that winnowed beneath his eyes, making his dark flesh look like dry, baked earth.  Though the younger man did not turn his head, his dark brown eyes slid to the right, quietly marking his location and appraisal.  The corner of his mouth flickered in a wry smile.

     He hadn't uttered a single word, but Dumbledore knew exactly what he meant.  _Trouble on the horizon, old friend.  _He was right about that.  He had never seen Fudge so single-minded, so bound to a purpose.  He meant to have his quarry, come what may.  

     He found himself in the unfamiliar territory of absolute uncertainty.  In the official records, Hogwarts fell under the encompassing umbrella of Ministerial authority, but in practice, it had long ago ceased operating within official parameters.  Former Ministers, and indeed, Fudge, had been more than happy to bestow upon him carte blanche in the administration of the school.  Its international accolades as a paragon of academic instruction had assured that.  They were glad to take credit for the success and leave him alone and unremarked.

     Since the disastrous Tri-wizard Tournament, the winds had shifted.  Humiliated by the revelation that a mad Voldemort loyalist had managed to escape Azkaban, murder his father-who had been hiding him for fourteen years, infiltrate the most secure institution in wizarding Britain, and fool the most brilliant mind in modern history, and stung by the unexplained death of one of their own, the bloom had quickly withered from the proverbial rose.  

     Complicating the matter was the fact that the Diggorys were contemplating civil action against the Ministry for wrongful death.  It would be dismissed, of course; Cedric had been informed of the risk he was undertaking and consented it its burden when he submitted his name.  In the meantime, though, it was a terrible blow to a government already maligned for allowing mass murderer Sirius Black to escape, and it was frothing to re-establish its dominance.

     He could cross wands with Fudge if it came to it.  Even at twice his age, Dumbledore was in far superior shape.  Fudge labored in an aristocratic politician's body, and for as long as he had known him, he had never seen the man refuse a platter.  He was soft-bodied and hard-headed, and the last time he'd used a wand for anything other than mundane magic, Dumbledore's hair had still been auburn.  The fight would end before it started.  It was the aftermath that troubled him.

     Unless he chose to go into exile, the repercussions would be immediate and severe.  He would be arrested and charged with treason, and no jury in the world would be able to render any other verdict than "guilty."  A new Headmaster would be appointed, one which most assuredly did not share his view.  A Ministry puppet to the last letter.  Which, naturally, precluded Deputy Headmistress McGonagall.  She was fiery and independent, and she would eat her wand with a side of kippers before she bowed and scraped to Cornelius Fudge.  

     Worst of all, Severus would be left unprotected, and all the torture and humiliation he had endured for the past fifteen years would be for naught.  He would have to find another way.  His mind raced, searching for the thinnest strand of hope, some kernel of buried knowledge that would salvage this situation from the jaws of defeat.  

     _There is _one_ thing,_ his mind whispered.

     _Not unless I have to.  That is a double-edged sword I would prefer to leave alone._

_     Afraid your sterling reputation will be tarnished?  After all Severus has suffered in your name, he deserves better than that.  Or has the Gryffindor in you begun to fade?_

_     My reputation is irrelevant.  Wizarding debts are not lightly recalled, and I want to be sure I have no other choice._

     Recollections undimmed by more than fifty years tried to crowd his mind, but he shoved them away.  If he started thinking of _that_, he would need to return to his office for more scotch, more in fact, than was currently available, and then he would be of no use to anyone.  He kept his eyes fixed on back of Fudge's head and counted the stairs as they descended.

     Fudge was taking them two at a time in his haste, and behind him, Dumbledore could hear the wheezing, ragged breath of the woman as she struggled to keep up.

     "All right, madam?" he called over his shoulder.

     "Er…yes, I'm…I'm very well," she panted.

     "Perhaps we should stop and give you a moment to compose yourself?" he suggested.

     Whatever response she had wanted to offer was interrupted by Fudge.  "Nonsense.  Ms. Umbridge will be fine," he snapped.

     "Quite," Umbridge concurred, though to Dumbledore's discerning ear, she sounded anything but.

     "Very well."

     Despite his vociferous stall tactics, they reached the Potions classroom with five minutes to spare.  Fudge strode to the door and grasped the handle, but Dumbledore laid a restraining hand upon his arm.

     "Cornelius, I understand your eagerness to resolve this most regrettable situation, but it might be best if I were the one to interrupt.  Severus can be…abrupt," he finished mildly.

     There was another suspect splutter from Kingsley, which earned him an inquisitive eyebrow from Dawlish.  Umbridge, leaning against the wall and snuffling like a mortally wounded Snorkack, said nothing, but her gimlet eyes were fixed on him and her superior with bleary intensity.

     "Yes, I suppose you're right."  Fudge stepped away from the door.

     "Excellent."

     He stepped up to the heavy wooden door, praying he appeared more sedate than he felt.  Once this door opened, events would very likely spiral irrevocably beyond his control.  Severus, for all his self-recrimination, was a proud man, as was Fudge, and neither was going to give any ground.  He doubted Severus would be rash enough to endanger his pupils, even if it meant his own debasement, but he wasn't convinced Fudge or Dawlish would exercise the same restraint.  Not now, when they were so close to victory.

     He didn't want to knock.  It seemed a betrayal of his Potions Master's tenuous trust to even humor Fudge's blustering.  

     _Trust in me, Severus.  That's what you told him seventeen years ago when he stumbled into your office white as curdled cream and covered in someone else's blood, right down to his teeth.  Trust.  Against his every instinct, he did, and from the moment he started down the long road to Damascus, he put every ounce of his failing faith in you.  Knock on that door, let _them _in, and you shatter him.  All the good you've done, undone in a single moment._

     What choice did he have?  Stand here waffling much longer, and Fudge would order them to enter without invitation and seize him by force.  It was better that he be the one to deliver the terrible news, rather than a grinning politician who had wished for years to watch him die beneath the clammy, greedy lips of a Dementor.  

     _He won't see it that way._

     Likely not.

Fudge was stamping his feet and scowling, so he muttered a breathless prayer for forgiveness and gave the door a smart rap.

     Silence, the scraping of a chair, and then, "Enter."

     He opened the door halfway, blocking his unwanted retinue from view.  "Professor Snape, I wonder if I might have a word?"

     Just as he had known he would, Severus glanced at the hourglass on his desk, his quill poised over a hapless parchment.  "The lesson will be finished in two minutes; give me until then.  I cannot leave these incompetents unsupervised.  Particularly Mr. Longbottom."  His thin lips curled in a disgusted sneer.

     Before Dumbledore could respond, Fudge pushed past him and threw the door wide open.

     "Professor Severus Snape, by order of the Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge, you are to accompany myself and the waiting Aurors forthwith.  Failure to comply immediately will result in forcible removal," he proclaimed, striding into the room and narrowly missing Rebecca Stanhope's outstretched foot.  He came to a stop in front of Severus' desk and faced him, hands clasped behind his back and feet wide apart.

     _Oh, Severus, I'm sorry,_ Dumbledore thought, and hurried inside.

     Severus Snape, who, before this unforgivable intrusion, had been attempting to teach the perpetual inepts in his charge the proper distillation of Doxy pheromones and mark parchments, eyed the pudgy figure in front of him in ill-tempered incredulity.  He had been expecting a response from the Ministry, but this was not what he had envisioned.  His eyes shifted to the Headmaster, searching for some indication that this was Fudge's idea of a put-on, but the Headmaster was grave and silent as a shadow.  No chance of a joke, then.

     _You didn't expect it to be.  This concerns Potter, after all.  Who else would come?_

     He set his quill down with deliberate care and brought his hands up to knead his temples.  "Minister Fudge, how good to see you."

     Fudge blinked at him, evidently perplexed at his marked lack of haste to obey Ministerial edict.  Plump fingers tugged at expensive purple robes.  

     "Perhaps you didn't hear me, Professor Snape," Fudge said coolly.

     Snape dropped his hands and stared at him.  "Of course I heard you," he snapped, barely suppressing the words _you twit_ before they escaped.  "As did they."  He gestured at the wall of disbelieving faces behind Fudge.

     His pupils were watching the unfolding drama with avid, morbid interest, some of them craning forward in their seats in hopes of a better view.  Weasley looked absolutely radiant with the hope that some great, divine justice was about to befall him.  On the opposite side of the room, perched in his eyrie, Draco was watching the proceedings with a closed, calculating expression.  The rest of the Slytherins, save Crabbe and Goyle, who seemed not to notice anything amiss, bore countenances of profound unease.  Pansy Parkinson was sucking compulsively on the tips of her hair.

     The realization that there were others in the room besides the evildoer and the harbingers of justice sent to bring him low bloomed on Fudge's face, the ugly red weal of a sudden bruise.  He wheeled to look upon the class and cleared his throat.

     "Class is dismissed.  Please move along to the next lesson if you have one, and if not, return to your Common Room," he ordered, trying to sound ingratiating and authoritative all at once and failing miserably.

     The students filed out, shuffling their feet and shifting their bags to prolong their exit until the last possible moment.  Only Stanhope remained where she was, hand resting on her guidance control, and eyes fixed on the wall in front of her.

     Fudge cleared his throat again and bent at the waist.  "The lesson is over, young lady," he said, speaking very loudly and wearing a vapid smile he apparently thought would convey kindness and reassurance.  It made him look positively gormless.

     _A truer expression by far than any he's worn today._

     Stanhope's eyes shifted from the grey stone wall to the pudgy, florid face in front of her, but she said nothing.

     "She is well aware of that," Snape murmured, rolling his eyes at the Minister's stupidity.  "Why are you still here, Miss Stanhope?" he asked, tearing his eyes away from Fudge.

     She turned her gaze at the sound of his voice.  "I'm afraid my chair is broken, sir."  She appeared unruffled by such a catastrophic development.

     "Broken?"

     "Yes, sir."

     He saw her eyes dart to the hourglass, and comprehension dawned.  It was Madam Pomfrey all over again.  There was still one minute of sand in the upper chamber, and she was not going to leave until it was empty. 

     _Audacious, mind-bendingly presumptuous chit,_ he thought incredulously.  The rational side of his temperament realized that this was her way of expressing silent support for him, but it could not override his reflexive disdain for all things Gryffindor, the secret suppurating suspicion that their honor was mockery.  Irritation flared in his chest, and he sneered contemptuously at her.

     "I suggest you fix it.  Immediately," he murmured, eyes flashing.

     Surprise flickered across her face for the briefest instant, a momentary widening of the eyes that passed even as it appeared, and then that odd detachment settled over her sharp, bloodless features.  The brightness of her eyes faded as she closed herself, and he saw her as she had been before the scalding, before the strange epiphanies and visions had bound them together in ways he could not explain.  Eyes flat and unreadable as covered mirrors, and lips sealed against any intercourse, save that which protocol deemed necessary.

     "Yes, sir."  Polite and clipped.  Her head bent to the side of the guidance box.

     He smothered a sardonic sniff.  What else did she expect of him?  Undying gratitude and a brave proclamation of appreciation?  Clearly she was not immune to the Gryffindor affliction of entitlement.  She was also severely deluded if she thought he needed her help.  He had dealt with far worse on his own, and even if assistance were necessary, he doubted she was either experienced or ruthless enough to render it.  

     After a few experimental clicks of the small silver switch protruding from the guidance stick's base, she straightened.  "I'm sorry, sir, but the extended Levitating Charm appears to have worn off.  Professor Blosker said it might."  Her face was scrupulously blank, but he was sure he detected a trace of challenge in her eyes.

     He bit the inside of his cheek to stifle a string of unbecoming oaths.  "Fix it."

     "I can't, sir."

     "Why not?" he asked through clenched teeth.  The vein in his temple began to throb.

     "Foolish wand-waving and silly incantations are forbidden in this class, sir."  

     She sat in front of him, cool as you please, her face a picture of innocence, hands resting limply on her armrests, and he was so flummoxed by her response that the breath stopped in his throat.  He stared at her, furious at her impudence.

     _That one was almost worthy of you._

     Yes, well, he was damned if he was going to acknowledge her bon mot.  He forced his jaw to relax and brushed a stray lock of hair from his forehead with practiced indifference.

     "While your friends may appreciate your sparkling wit, I am unimpressed," he said quietly.  "Thirty points for insolence, and if you do not get that infernal machine of yours out of my sight in ten seconds, it will be forty."

     Her eyes darted to the edge of his desk again, and he saw her shoulders relax.

     "Yes, sir."

     She plunged her right hand into her robes, and after several moments of stiff, jerky contortions, it emerged again clutching her wand.  Pushing herself into a more presentable position, she exhaled shortly, brushed her fringe out of her eyes, and pointed her wand at the control stick.  Her tongue darted out to moisten her lips.

     "_Semper Wingardium leviosa_!"

     Her chair was enveloped in a shimmering blue haze, and it lifted from the floor with a grating scrape of dust and wheels.  The color faded, lingering as an afterimage against his eyes even when all trace of it was gone.  She hovered half an inch above the floor, and when she turned the control stick, the wheels pivoted dreamily against the nothingness.  

     She tucked her wand into her robes again, grimacing as her errant fingers snagged on the fabric.  Then she looked up at him.  

     "I'll be off now, sir," she said.

     "See that you are," he snarled.

     "Will you be expecting me for detention?"  Her eyes darted to Fudge, then back to him.

     "Most unlikely.  More pressing matters than your idiocy require my attention."

     Fudge uttered and indignant tut, but said nothing, shuffling his feet and rubbing his hands together in his impatience.  The Headmaster watched him from over the rims of his spectacles, his expression grave and gently disapproving, but he did not intervene.

     Come to think of it, Albus hadn't stepped in _at all_, and that struck him as strange.  Though maddeningly lackadaisical in the day-to-day operation of the school, the man was a brilliant leader in times of crisis.  Every instinct should have told him to send Stanhope from the room as quickly as possible so that her inquisitive ears and sentinel eyes couldn't spirit away any nuggets of illicit gossip, but nearly three minutes after Fudge's pompous braying, she was still here, and the Headmaster seemed wholly unperturbed.

     _She's buying time.  Unintentionally, but he'll take it where he can.  That's why he won't intervene._

     The fact that Albus needed the precious seconds and minutes bought by Stanhope's bumbling sent a chill into the pit of his stomach.  It meant that things were going very badly.  Badly enough to send him to Azkaban.  And if he went there this time, there would be no reprieve.

     The thought of dank walls crawling with spongy grey moss and stinking of lifetimes of rot soured his mouth, and he swallowed to repress a gag.  Once had been enough.  More than enough.

     Stanhope was still sitting in front of him, and he looked down at her expectantly.  "Yes, Miss Stanhope?"

     Her mouth opened, then closed, and she swallowed with an audible click.  Thin lips grew thinner still, twitching with the need to speak.  Then she bowed her head in acquiescence.  

     "Yes, sir."

     He turned away from her and heard the click and grind of her gears as she finally moved, then a pause.  He turned in time to see her cast a terrified glance at Dumbledore, and then she was gone, the petulant growl of her chair fading in the distance.  

     "Interesting child," Fudge murmured thoughtfully.

     Dumbledore closed the classroom door with a gentle click.  "Oh, indeed.  Most enlightening."

     "Of that I'm certain, but that is hardly why we're here.  No, I'm afraid nastier business is afoot."  Fudge glowed with gleeful malevolence.

     Snape snorted and returned to his seat, straightening his robes before he sat.  "Potter is always a disagreeable business," he muttered.

     "Your…dislike of Potter is well known, Severus.  May I call you Severus?"  Fudge flashed him a disingenuous smile that did not reach his eyes.  "Which is why the circumstances of his illness are so mysterious."

     "Professor Snape, Minister," Snape purred.  "And as for Potter's accident, there is nothing mysterious about his blatant stupidity."

     "Severus," the Headmaster chided.

     Snape knew he should be more discreet in his discourse with the Minister of Magic, but he didn't see the point.  Fudge had been after him since he was twenty years old, and if he could use the mishap with Potter to ensnare him, then he would.  All the supercilious decorum in the world wouldn't spare him.  Frankly, he wished Fudge would just spit out the accusation lurking behind his gilded innuendo.  He wished _anybody _would, for that matter.  He was tired of the perverse delicacy with which his colleagues treated him, the sidelong glances and the sussurating chatter that ceased abruptly whenever he drew near.

     "You don't seem terribly concerned about what's happened," Fudge pointed out, looming over his desk.

     "Potter has an entire retinue of wailing teeth-gnashers at his call.  I won't be missed."

     "Well, we'll soon find out about that.  I'm placing you under arrest on suspicion of attempted murder."

     "On what grounds?" Dumbledore stepped forward, his wand materializing from the interior of his robes.

     "He is a Potions Master.  The boy was poisoned with a toxin found only in his locked stores.  What other proof do I need?"  Fudge hissed triumphantly.

     "His past has no bearing, then?"  Dumbledore was thoughtful, turning his wand end over end in his hand.

     "Of course it does.  I doubt I'll find it necessary to disclose such a thing, though.  Unless the Wizengamot needs…persuasion."  

"I see."

"Shacklebolt, Dawlish," Fudge called.  

     The handle drew downward, but before the door could open, the Headmaster brought up his wand.

     "_Ceritas!"_  The tumbler turned in the lock with a silky click.

     "What are you doing?" Fudge snapped, eyes flickering from the tip of Dumbledore's wand to the locked door.  His face had gone an ugly plum.

     "I'm afraid I cannot allow you to take him."

     "Allow me?" Fudge sputtered.  "This is not a choice.  I'm the Minister of Magic, and my authority far exceeds yours."  He jabbed a shaking finger at Dumbledore's bland face.

     "Oh, indeed you are," Dumbledore agreed, "and indeed it does, but I believe we have unfinished business of our own."

     "What business?" Fudge snarled.

     "Don't you remember, Cornelius?"  The Headmaster seemed surprised, even a trifle disappointed.  "I've not forgotten it; not in fifty years."

     Fudge, who had been progressing from plum to asphyxsia black, paled, the explosive retort he'd been about to release dying on his lips.  He swayed and raised and hand to cover his mouth, and even in the rapidly growing darkness, Snape saw that it was trembling.

     "You owe me a life debt, Cornelius.  It's time you repaid it."

     Snape watched the confrontation between the two men in stupefied silence.  The stale, damp air of the dungeon rippled with electricity and tension, making the hairs on the nape of his neck prickle.  Whatever was happening here was older than the days of his life and bitter as tannin.  A thousand unspoken words hummed in the air like low frequency signals from the Wizarding Wireless, inaudible but present, an insistent pressure against his eardrums.

     _Fifty years ago?  Calling in an old debt on my behalf?  How utterly ridiculous!_

     Much as he dreaded incarceration in Azkaban, he refused to allow Albus to do something so patently ludicrous.  Wizarding life debts were sacred contracts, and they should be used for better purposes than the undeserved salvation of a former Death Eater.  Besides, though he loved the man as much as his crippled, anesthetized heart could love anyone, it remained that he was a Gryffindor, and Snape would rather taste the decaying lips of a Dementor than indenture himself once more to their nauseating nobility.

     "Headmaster," he began, and rose with the intention of putting a stop to the brewing histrionics on his account.

     "Sit down, Severus."  It was not a request, and Dumbledore's voice was so sharp that he obeyed without thinking.  His blue eyes never left Fudge's ashen face.

     "It is my right as holder of the debt to decide its payment.  Under magical law, you cannot refuse."

     "And you would waste it on _him?_"  Fudge spared Snape a contemptuous, disinterested glance, and despite thinking the very same thing only seconds before, Snape bristled.

     _Incompetent sod,_ he thought.

     "I consider it a worthy exchange."

     Fudge snorted, wearing an expression that said he thought Dumbledore completely mad, and though Snape privately agreed, he longed to hex his sneering face into far-reaching eternity.  He was more than happy to damn himself; he didn't need outside confirmation of his unsalvageability.

     "Do you accept?" the Headmaster prodded when Fudge did not answer.

     "What do you want?"  Beneath the Ministerial bravado was weary resignation.

     "Severus stays here until the investigation is complete.  If it is found that he was responsible, I will deliver him to Azkaban myself."

     Fudge was silent for a very long time, and when at last he spoke, his voice was dripping with rage and humiliation.  "All right," he hissed, his eyes little more than puffy slits in his outraged face, "but I have conditions of my own."

     Dumbledore waited, hands clasped behind his back, his wand dangling between his fingers.

     "He doesn't leave his chambers," he said, jerking his head toward Snape.  "Not for meals, not to teach lessons, not even to stretch his legs.  No contact with the students.  I can't have him tampering with witnesses or evidence."   Fudge began to pace as he spoke.

     "Secondly, I insist that the Ministry be involved in the investigation.  Aurors will assist in searches and interrogations.  I will remain here to ensure that things go smoothly.  Of course, lessons and preparation for O.W.L.S. and N.E.W.T.S. will be disrupted as little as possible."

     "Of course.  Refreshing to see that the Ministry holds education in such high regards," Dumbledore said drily.

     Fudge gave Dumbledore a dubious, appraising glance.  Then, "Accept these terms, or I take him to Azkaban, life debt or not."  Scoured ice.

     "Very well."  Dumbledore somberly extended his hand.  He did not smile when Fudge took it.  He broke the handshake more quickly than Snape had ever seen him, and when Fudge turned away, he wiped his hand on the side of his robe, as though to cleanse it of something foul.  "I'll take his teaching duties for the time being."  He started toward the door.

     "I said no contact with the pupils," Fudge said softly, looking at Snape with undisguised glee.

     Dumbledore stopped.  "And he has been relieved of his duties."

     "Not all of them."

     The Headmaster's brow knitted in confusion, and he looked at Snape in quiet consternation.  "I don't-oh, I see," he murmured.  "I don't see any reason-,"

     "No contact.  Refuse, and I take him now."  Fudge's hand twitched, longing to grasp his wand.

     Snape saw the Headmaster's shoulders, the shoulders that had so often borne the weight of the world slump, and he realized something unpleasant was going to happen, but it wasn't until Dumbledore approached him and reached for the collar of his robes that he understood exactly what.  His heart cramped in his chest, and he took an involuntary step back.

     "Severus, please."  Mournful and imploring.

     The Head of House pin affixed to his collar was a serpent of silver and jade.  The very hands that were now reaching for it had given it to him when he was twenty-two.  The youngest teacher and Head of House in Hogwarts' history.  He had received it with the same pride with which he had once received the Dark Mark, and to this day, it was his greatest achievement.  He had earned it.  It was his, and no one, not even the sniveling brats who thought themselves his betters, could take it from him.

     Now, Potter, the child he reviled above all the rest, was going to strip it from him, tear from him the dignity he'd fought so hard for and leave him exposed and vulnerable, just as his preening father and his cohorts had done all those years ago.  Comatose in his bed, the boy was still destroying him.  It wasn't fair.  For fifteen years, he'd endured the unendurable, shrieking lies beneath unending waves of torture and tasting bile in his throat, and for his belief in the Light, this was his reward.

     Dumbledore stretched forth his fingers, and this time they found their mark.  He stood in silence, quivering with humiliation and impotent rage as the pin was plucked from its nest of black cotton, and for the first time in his adult life, he felt no love when he looked into his mentor's face.

"Severus-,"

     "No platitudes, Headmaster," he choked savagely.  "If that will be all."

     Before Dumbledore could reply, he stalked to the door, whipped out his wand, unlocked it, and jerked it open.  Behind him, Fudge started to call out, but his words were cut off in mid-sentence.  It didn't matter.  Nothing mattered anymore.  He had merely traded one death and one prison for another.

     Inside Hogwarts and out, the darkness descended.    


	29. In the Room of Things Unseen

Chapter Twenty-Nine

     The Gryffindor Common Room, morose and sepulchral since their beloved avatar's collapse, exploded in a maelstrom of conjecture and speculation that night.  Snape had not been seen at dinner, and most took this as a sign that he had indeed been whisked away to Azkaban.  The younger students pressed eyewitnesses for each prurient detail, crowding around the teller with the excited rustle of shifting cotton.  Even some of the older students gathered round.  Lee Jordan's prominent black mop loomed above a gaggle of first-years crowded breathlessly around Parvati Patel as she recounted the afternoon's drama with unsettling relish.

     The prevailing mood was one of disbelief and cautious optimism.  Snape was a tyrant and a bully, the bane of the weak and shy, and the thought that he might soon be banished from their lives like the lifting of a long-suffered curse dangled before their eyes, a watery ray of light parting the bilious clouds of their torment.  They gave no thought to what would become of him.  What was more, they didn't care.  They were young, and he was evil, and the concept of death and its terrible finality was as remote from them as the biting, violating sting of the hypodermic or the rough crudity of an enema.

     Rebecca, who had experienced both these things and many more, sat in her customary corner, slouched more than usual with the weight of fatigue and diffuse worry.  Her jaws ached from constant clenching, and her eyes felt gritty and strained, as if she had been straining over fine and ancient print.  Or weeping.  She blinked rapidly, trying to coax her natural tear reflex, bringing up a frozen hand to swipe listlessly at them.

     She knew there would be no detention tonight.  Filch always arrived at ten minutes until eight, and it was already half-past.  She had waited for the knock, hoped against hope for it, crept around the Common Room on the lowest possible speed setting so she would hear it over the furtive, perpetually surprised growl of her chair and the simmering din of hushed conversation, but even as she had prowled and paced and bitten her bottom lip until it was raw and tender, she had known it was not coming.  Now that her gut feeling had come to fruition, she felt like weeping.  Despite the sandpaper dryness of her eyes, the need to cry massed in her frail chest like a cramp, lodged behind her breast like the stealthy stirrings of a killing tumor.  She drew a deep breath, but the crisp November air inside the Common room did little to dispel the urge; the icy, aching burn of it coated her mouth and throat, and the urge to weep tightened its vise.

     She could not articulate, even in her own mind, _why_ she wanted, _needed_ to cry.  The desire simply existed, starting in the soles of her feet and swallowing her whole, enveloping her skin in a clammy, prickling coolness.  She trailed her fingers along her forearm to rub the sensation away, but it was merely displaced, and it returned the instant her finger continued on its path.  

     Looking at her Housemates as they milled and chatted was like watching the world from behind fever glaze.  Everyone seemed to be moving too quickly or too slowly.  The sounds were warped as well.  Laughter sounded like screams, and the melancholy pop of the torches sounded like bones on desert sand.

     _Roll them bones_, she thought, and rested her head against the chilled stone behind her.

     There was a rousing game of Exploding Snap by the fireplace.  The twins and Seamus had invited her to join in when it became apparent that her gleefully miserable escort was not coming, but she had politely declined, opting for the barren comfort of her shadowy corner.  Celebration struck her as grotesque.  She started at a victorious shout from Seamus, who had just bested Fred for the third time.

     She closed her eyes against a wave of sudden vertigo.  She felt mad.  The world had tilted on its axis, not a gargantuan lurch that sent everything into spinning chaos, but the tiniest incremental degree.  Up was still up, down was still down, and in the morning the sun that rose in the sky would still be a hazy lemon-yellow, but things were different.  The center on which her wheels had always been so firmly planted had shifted, and where once bedrock had been was treacherously shifting sand.

     The creeping sensation of impending madness was unwelcome, but not unfamiliar.  Ugly memories bubbled in her reluctant subconscious, their age-blackened tips and edges parting the desperate layers of forgetfulness into which they had been packed, glistening in the unforgiving light of recollection before sinking again.  The finger rubbing her forearm was moving faster now, trying to shore up failing defenses, scour the past from its rightful place with a pendulum sweep of flesh on flesh.

     _I don't want to think about this_.  She bit the inside of her cheek and dropped her gaze to her lap.

_     I know you don't, but you have to.  You're going to, whether you like it or not.  _Her grandfather, the gentleness in his gravelly voice belying the steel of absolute conviction.

     _Why?_ she whined, knowing she sounded like a petulant child and not caring.  She was tired, far too tired to cope with the specters rattling their chains and pounding on the walls in unrequited lamentation.  She just wanted to sit here and think and watch, and as soon as was acceptable, seek the warm refuge of her bed, where she could listen to Winky hum and squeak as she tucked her beneath the covers and pretend she hadn't seen the wolves circling their prey with grinning, dripping jaws.

     _Fine.  You can do that.  You can go to bed and act like nothing happened, and in the morning, you can go into the Great Hall and stare at that empty chair.  Can you still pretend then, or will the food catch in your throat and harden into concrete in the pit of your stomach?  _

She already knew the answer to that.  What little she had managed to eat was still lodged in her stomach like greasy stones, and each time she moved, her stomach lurched and lolled, occasionally sending out a growl of protest.  She suspected it would make a rather ungraceful exit before sleep gained a foothold tonight.  She hadn't tasted a bite of it, registering its passage to her stomach as tasteless lumps of varying temperature.  She had been so consumed with the empty seat at the High Table that she had raised her empty spoon to her mouth several times before George nudged her in the ribs and asked if she would like a bit of mash with her metal.

     No one else had paid it more than a cursory glance as they took their seats, but she hadn't been able to tear her eyes away from it.  Sturdy oak and rich green cushions, silent and pathetic as an unmarked grave.  It had made her want to scream, flee the Hall and leave the terrible apparition at her heels, and more than once she had to chase the untasted spoonfuls with sips of warm apple cider to keep from choking.  

     _You weren't the only one noticing that chair.  Stupid vanity to think so.  Dumbledore noted it well enough.  Don't think his elbows ever crossed the plane from his place at the table to where your Potions Master's plate should be.  McGonagall didn't fancy looking at it, either.  Never seen a woman more interested in her victuals._

_     And then there were the Slytherins, of course._

     She shivered and wrapped her Gryffindor scarf more tightly around her throat.  The Slytherins.  How could she forget them?  To a man, they sat at their table and stared at the empty chair.  There was no conversation, no harsh, snide laughter ringing out across the Hall, just two hundred pairs of eyes riveted to the High Table.  It was as though they were waiting for the commencement of some great and secret show, to see their Head of House appear in a puff of varicolored smoke and take his customary seat.  Nothing of the sort happened.  The seat remained empty, and the elegant clank of cutlery on china reverberated the length of the Slytherin table, a secret message only they could comprehend.  When one of the younger Housemates made an ill-advised attempt at conversation, he was summarily silenced by a withering glare from his neighbor.

     Even Draco had been silent, his pale, aristocratic face devoid of his usual smug hauteur.  Pinched, he had been, his thin, pink lips pressed into a tight line, smudges of grey beneath his eyes.  The food on his plate had gone largely untouched, his whipped potatoes unharrowed by either fork or spoon.  He had stared at the professor's chair in unflinching concentration, as though willing Professor Snape to take form before his eyes, and when no such miracle occurred, he scowled at those around him in disgust.

     He had caught her staring at him.  Weariness and stress had made her lax, and she looked a split second too long, lingering over the porcelain skin and crown of impossible platinum hair.  Grey eyes had met curious blue, and they had glared at one another across the distance.  Her first instinct had been to avert her eyes; she hadn't meant to ogle him, but her stubborn pride refused to allow it.  She knew if she dropped her gaze, he would count it as submission, so she jutted her chin at him in an expression of quiet defiance.

     Had he decided to get up and bridge the gap between them in the name of answering her half-hearted challenge, things would have gone badly for her.  She had been-and still was-utterly exhausted, wrung out from the frenzied speculations whirling through her mind, and a duel would have been a catastrophic farce.  She doubted she could have managed to reach her wand, much less raise it to ward off the attack.

     Maybe he had simply been too preoccupied with his missing Head of House to bother with her.  Perhaps he considered sparring with her beneath him, the equivalent of scrapping with a leper.  Whatever the reason, he hadn't moved, hadn't even shifted his position.  The corner of his mouth had curved upward in a desultory, dismissive smirk, and then his eyes had found the empty chair again.  Before she could stop herself, hers had joined them.

     _Never thought I'd have a damn thing in common with Draco Malfoy._

_     The hell you didn't.  You've got more in common with him than you want to admit.  You're both survivors._

_     No, I'm a survivor.  He's a parasite._

_     He might be.  But he's still alive, and he sees.  Just like you._

     She snorted, scrubbing her rapidly numbing cheek with the palm of her hand.  Grandpa could prate until he was blue in his long-dead face about the similarities between her and Draco Malfoy, but she wasn't going to believe him.  It just wasn't so.  Draco was a greasy, snotty, simpering, spoiled little rich boy who had gotten everything by virtue of his name and his father's wealth.  The clothes on his black sprung, not from the sweat of his brow or the toil of his hands, but from the seed between his father's thighs, or more reasonably, the fortuitous seed from betwixt thighs that had last walked the earth a thousand years ago.  Her father had worked his hands to the bleeding, weather-beaten raw to give her the things she had.

     _So he did.  But you haven't worked a day in your life, either.  Your hands are as smooth as his._

_     You know damn well why.  I'd work if I could.  Malfoy would slit his own throat before he lifted a single dainty finger._

_     You going to think about it now?_

_     Nice change of subject, grandpa.  Ducking a point you can't refute?_

_     Just know when to save my breath.  You've got to think about it sometime, girl.  _

_     Why?  What good will it do to dredge _that_ up?  Why can't I leave it alone?  _

_     You'll need it before the end._

_     End of what?_

There was no answer to that, and she was glad.  She was weary of riddles and dreams and specters that gave her no peace.  Her soul felt thin, overextended.  She was being pulled in opposite directions, and she had no desire to explore either.  She just wanted to study for her O.W.L.S. and be with her friends.  What was happening with Professor Snape was none of her concern, and if she tried to intervene, that was exactly what they would tell her.  

     Besides, who was to say he _hadn't_ done it?  She'd only been here a little over two months; surely the other students and staff had a better, firmer grasp of Hogwarts' reality than she did.  They had been with him for years, seen him outside his professional capacity.  They had lived with him, eaten with him.  Some of the older professors likely taught him.  They must be better attuned to his temperament, better able to gauge the things of which he was capable.  They all mistrusted him at the least and loathed him at the most.  They couldn't all be wrong.

     _Maybe they just don't care.  They've been handed the means by which to be rid of an inconvenience, and they intend to make the most of it.  Just like Deidre and her lackeys.  They knew Judith Pruitt didn't deserve to be ridiculed, shunned, torn apart, but it didn't matter.  She was ugly and weak, and that was all the justification they needed.  When pangs of conscience plagued them in the middle of the night, they told themselves that she brought it on herself, that she needed it.  That which didn't kill her would make her stronger.  They never considered that she might not be strong enough, that it _would_ kill her, and when it did, they told themselves that she was better off.  And believed it.  Like you did._

She winced.  She could remember thinking the same thing herself, and she hadn't been one of the tormentors, only one of the silent witnesses.  It was what she had told herself as she'd sat, dry-eyed and bored, beside Jackson Declan at her memorial service.  _Better off.  Better off without her to weigh us down._  She'd twisted a useless tissue in her hands, braiding a paper hangman's noose.

     _Like a millstone.  That's how I thought of her.  Might as well have been a bag of rocks in that casket for all I cared.  _She felt dizzy with shame.  _But McGonagall and the others _ _wouldn't think like that.  They're adults.  They know better.  They have to._

_     Why?  You know better, and naiveté won't help you now.  Walking adults can be just as petty and vengeful as crippled children, more, if truth be told.  They can go their entire lives without depending on anyone else.  No need for caution._

_     What if they're right?  What if he did it?_

_     Do you really believe that, deep in your guts, where you hold everything that matters?_

She rested her chin on her upturned hand.  Images coalesced and evaporated in her mind, one following the other, a mental heartbeat.  The dead, wrenching blankness in Professor Snape's eyes when he thought she was too absorbed in her work to notice.  The fleeting horror in them when he saw his fingers branded on her shoulder and the surprising gentleness with which he'd tended her.  The stupefied incredulity stamped on his pallid face as Harry Potter, Golden Child and Holy Savior without a choice crumpled in his arms.  The dazed helplessness as he regarded his dumbstruck pupils, who were already gathering the stones of accusation.

     _No, I don't._  She scratched the bridge of her nose.  _But so what?  My opinion carries no weight.  I'm just a transfer student, and except for Professor Snape, people here think I'm sharp as a spoon.  If I go to McGonagall with my gut instinct, she'll just pat me on the head and chivvy me out the door, convinced that Professor Snape has warped my fragile mind._

_     Go to Dumbledore._

_     And tell him what?  That I know Professor Snape didn't do it because I see it in his eyes?  I'm sure that'll clear things up straightaway.  Unless I have proof, I won't have to worry about checking myself into St. Mungo's to ride out the next bout of hormone-induced visions.  The green-robed Medi-witches will be happy to escort me._

_     So you're just going to let it happen?  Just going to sit and watch like you did with Judith?  If he goes, there won't be any memorial service, no place for you to express your regret or lack thereof.  There won't even be a body._

_     What do you want me to do?_  She wanted to scream and beat her fists against her knees.  The urge to weep, slumbering while she pondered, awakened with a miserable throb inside her chest.

     _Do something.  Anything but nothing.  _

_     I'm fifteen, _she whined.  _And I'm not a crusader.  I believe that's in Potter's job description._

_     You're old enough to make choices, _he snapped, _and I thought I raised you to make the right ones.  Potter is a mite indisposed at the moment, so I'm afraid someone will have to take up the slack._

_     Why me?_

_     Who else is going to do it?_

She eyed her Housemates in silence.  The room had begun to clear, the younger ones scuttling to bed, but those that remained showed no sign of surrendering the celebration.  Indeed, it had intensified.  Fred, George, and Seamus were still playing Exploding Snap, their shouts and catcalls making her head ache.  She squinted against the noise and catalogued the faces she saw.  

     Hermione and Ron still hadn't returned from visiting Harry.  Nor had the Creevey brothers, who had trailed after the dispirited pair like baleful stewards.  No doubt they had gone to tell the sleeping Potter the news.  Lee Jordan and Dean Thomas were huddled in the far corner, scribbling furiously on a parchment.  Parvati Patel and Lavender Brown had sequestered themselves in the girls' dormitory with the somnolent pronouncement that they were going to Divine the Potions Master's fate, which was sure to be suitably tragic.  Rebecca's hands had ached to seize them by the collars of their robes and hurl them headlong out the nearest window.

     No, there was no one else for it, and that realization made her stomach sink.  More terrible still was the knowledge that such total indifference wasn't born of inveterate callousness and cruelty, but of the professor's own unrepentant churlishness.  He had pushed everyone away, by necessity or preference, and now that he needed them, there was no one to step forward, to speak for him.  

     Even if she could persuade someone of his innocence, there was no guarantee it doing any good.  Her knowledge of wizarding law ended at the common sense edict that magic was not to be performed in public, and certainly never to be used to the malicious detriment of another.  Other than that, she knew nothing.  It was entirely possible that Professor Snape had been dead for hours, his body sundered from his sentience the moment her rear wheels crossed the threshold into the corridor.

     _Whatever a Dementor is, I doubt they keep them tucked in their robes.  The way Seamus talked, they sounded like a banshee, and there wasn't one lazing in the corridor when you left._

_     They could've used Avada Kedavra,_ her mind persisted, refusing to be derailed by logic.

     _Don't be ridiculous.  That's an Unforgivable.  They can't use those._

_     Oh, yes, they can.  They can do exactly as they please.  Who's going to reprimand them?  It's see no evil, hear no evil, and if you didn't see or hear it, then you certainly can't speak of it._

_     Dumbledore would not let them kill him without trial._

_     Who said he had a choice?  His hands might have been bound by the law.  The Ministry signs his checks, after all.  Maybe there was nothing he could do._

_     There had to have been something.  He's the Headmaster.  If _he _couldn't do anything, then what makes you think I can?_

     She covered her face with her hands, blocking out the light and the Gryffindor furniture that suddenly reminded her of blood.  She swallowed against her heaving stomach and pressed her palms against her burning eyes.  She wished she were once more in the land of the sane, where her most dire concerns were whether or not to eat the stale cookie that passed for dessert in the D.A.I.M.S. cafeteria and if she should bathe before bed or first thing in the morning.

     Moisture dripped onto her palms, and she blinked, startled.  Somewhere along the winding discourse of her thoughts, she had begun to weep.  She wiped the tears away with a wry, watery snort.  _That_ would help matters.  Cry a few tears and look pitiful, and the world would fall into place.  She snorted again, louder this time.  What would Professor Snape think if he saw her like this, weeping and wringing her hands like an ineffectual, witless child?

     He'd say plenty, all right, none of it pleasant, and not all of it with his tongue.  A reproachful, furious glare from his black eyes was more effective than any weaving of words could ever hope to be, and when he turned from her in disgusted dismissal, the angry stiffening of his thin shoulders would wound as deeply as a blow.  

     _Pull yourself together, Miss Stanhope,_ he snarled inside her head.  _One can hardly be a Gryffindor martyr with mucus streaming down their nose.  Wouldn't do well for the front page of the _Daily Prophet_._

What little comfort she might have drawn from the thought of his omnipresent sarcasm in the face of her dewy-eyed self-pity was dashed by the one that followed it.

     _Assuming he's still capable of such vituperative retort.  Or any response whatsoever._

     The idea was so heinous that a soft, hysterical titter escaped her, and she clapped her hand over her mouth before it degenerated into a breathless sob.  It was time to go to bed, regardless of the time told by the hissing, serpentine breath of the hourglass.  She needed to think, hide beneath the sparse shelter of her down comforter and Winky's soothing, singsong squeak, and let her mind work unencumbered by her heart's interference.

     _You'll dream tonight._

     There was no doubt about that, just as there was no doubt that her spare and reluctant supper would make a surprise reappearance before the rising of the sun, but she would take her chances with the familiar bogeys of her nightmares rather than sit here and stare into the face of the monstrosity waking life had so swiftly become.  It reminded her too much of former, uglier days.

     She started toward the girls' dormitory and nearly screamed when a hand fell on her shoulder.  Jerking her control stick hard right, she almost crushed Neville Longbottom's toes beneath her wheels.

     "Christ in a sidecar, Neville," she rasped, sagging in relief when she saw his round, earnest face.

     "Christ in a sidecar?" he repeated, his brow knitted in consternation at her odd turn of phrase.  After a moment, he gave it up and fixed her with a concerned gaze.  "Are you all right?  You look a bit off."

     She opened her mouth to tell him she was fine, that she was only tired and needed to go to bed, then closed it again.  It was untrue, and if she looked a fraction as bad as she felt, he would certainly see through it.  He was retiring, not stupid.  Besides, she could use a confidant, someone to help her sort through the muddle of supposition and raw emotions ricocheting through her head.  There was no law that said she had to tell him everything, and she was on more than nodding acquaintance with the necessary lie.

     "No, Neville, I'm not.  I'm about twenty miles from all right," she said quietly, her voice wavering.  "But I can't.  Not here."  Her eyes darted to the table by the fireplace, where the twins and Seamus were cackling at some shared joke.

     His expression of concern deepened, and it was so endearing that she managed a weak smile.  He bit his lower lip and gently sucked it into his mouth.  It was clear by the faraway drift of his eyes that he was lost in thought.  Then the hand resting on her shoulder gave it a reassuring squeeze, and the misty veil lifted from his eyes.

     "I know where we can go," he whispered abruptly.  "Come on."

     She gaped at him, taken aback by the unexpected confidence in his voice.  It was so unlike the timid, perpetually waffling boy to whom she'd become accustomed that she wondered if the entire conversation wasn't a vivid, stress-bred hallucination.  Then he was striding toward the portrait hole, head down and eyes to the front to avoid drawing the notice of the others.  When he reached it, he turned and waited, beckoning her with the fingers of one hand.

     _Don't know where we're going, but it's got to be better than here._  Before she could talk herself out of it, she followed, casting a furtive glance over her shoulder to be sure they had avoided roving eyes.  Heads were still bent over cards or textbooks, and nobody moved when the Fat Lady swung outward. 

     "Where are we going?" she asked when the portrait closed behind them.  She spoke softly, keeping a watchful eye out for Filch and Mrs. Norris.  The curfew would go into effect any minute now, and she pitied the person foolhardy enough to be caught out.  

     "A place I know," he murmured vaguely.  "It isn't far.  Come on."

     He set off again, wand clutched in a sweaty, white-knuckled grip, and she hurried to keep up.  He stopped directly opposite the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy and turned to her.

     "Think of the thing you need the most," he said.

     "What?"

     "Just do it.  Hurry, Ron and Hermione will be along soon."  He looked up and down the corridor to be sure they weren't being observed.

     She shrugged.  She wasn't sure where he was going with this, but he had cared enough to ask, and that counted for something.  It couldn't do any harm.  Maybe this was his attempt at cheering her up, of distracting her from herself.  Maybe it was a game or an illusion.  She searched his face for a hint of amusement or secret mirth-the errant twitch of lips or the devilish twinkle of the eye-but saw only increasing urgency.

     "Hurry!" he pleaded, bobbing on the balls of his heels in impatience.

     "All right, all right!" she huffed.  "I've got it."

     "You sure?"

     She rolled her eyes.  "If there's one thing I do know, it's my own mind."

     "Right.  Now touch the wall and come back three times."

     She blinked.  This was ridiculous.  She was tired and confused and in no mood to be doing the wheelchair equivalent of suicide runs.  She crossed her arms across her chest and fixed him with a flat, red-eyed gaze.

     "If this is your idea of a joke, Neville Longbottom, it isn't funny.  I'm tired and sore and plain old pissed off."  _And scared sick for the bane of your existence._

"It's not a ruddy joke!  I'm not having a go at you.  If you really want a place to talk where we won't be found, you'll just have to trust me."  His tone was a mixture of plea and indignation.

     For the second time that night she stared at him in astonished admiration, a brief smile curving the corners of her wan mouth.  She had never seen him display such chutzpah, and it sent a warm glow into her tempestuous belly to know he was doing so on her behalf.

     "Three times, you said?"

     He nodded once.

     She rolled forward and let her trainer-clad feet graze the chill stone, then did an abrupt volte-face and moved away.  She skidded to a stop at Neville's feet, the strident click of the directional magnets echoing in the empty corridor.  Another about-face, and she was barreling toward the wall again.

     _Here we go 'round the mulberry bush, mulberry bush, mulberry bush, _she thought as she spun around again.

     Neville was shifting from foot to foot as she brushed his feet for the third pass.  When she came to a stop, he looked past her and smiled.  "Outstanding."

     "What is?" she asked, and turned to see.

     She was startled to see a door where solid wall had been seconds before.  Its polished brass knob gleamed in the rheumy torchlight, throwing off brilliant sparks of light.  The wood was smooth but blackened with age, sturdy as the pillars of Samson's temple.  There was something familiar about it, though she couldn't say what.  So close that she couldn't see it.

     Before she could ponder it further or ask Neville about its sudden appearance, the scraping shuffle of footsteps sounded in the hall.  They both froze, their ears straining to gather even the slightest detail.  They were heavy and stumping, the tread of someone burdened by weariness and leaden despair.  They waited for Filch's nasally rasp to pierce the air, to hear him mutter to his beloved familiar about the ungrateful brats over whom he was forced to watch.  Instead, they heard at least two pairs of shambling feet, then a high, tear-choked voice.  

     "Hermione!" she and Neville hissed in unison.

     "Quick!" Neville whispered, lunging for the miraculous door.  "In here!"  He wrenched it open and dashed inside, standing aside so she could enter.  

     The moment her rear wheels cleared the arc of the door, he slammed it shut and fell against it with a sigh.

     "That was close," he panted, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his robe.

     "Won't they see the door?"  

     He shook his head.  "No.  It disappears once you close it.  No one can see it but us."

     "How did you-," she began, but she trailed off when she noticed the expression of dazed repugnance on his face.  "What's wrong?"

     "Is _this_ what you wished for, Rebecca?" he asked slowly.

     She spun around to take in her environs, and for a long while, she said nothing.  She simply sat and stared at the room in front of her, torn between blessed comfort and a bruising ache that settled onto her chest like the onset of croup.  A breath hitched in her throat, then another, and a hard knot lodged there.  Warm tears slid from her raw eyes.

     "Oh, my God," was all she could manage.

     All the blood drained from Neville's face.  "Oi, I'm sorry, Rebecca, it's never done this before.  It's supposed to give you the thing you need the most."  He stepped forward and placed a leading hand on her forearm.  "We'll go somewhere else."

     "No."  She tore her arm from his well-meaning grasp and rolled out of reach, eyes still riveted to the scene before her.  "No," she said a trifle more calmly, wiping her streaming eyes.  "This is fine."

     It was the Potions classroom, down to the last detail.  Professor Snape's desk presided over the front of the room, the hourglass that ticked out the seconds, minutes, and hours of his penance and her punishment hunkered on the corner like a forgotten sentry.  His eagle feather quill jutted defiantly from the stolid black inkwell, standing at attention lest he should enter and catch it unawares.  In the center of the desk lay two sheets of parchment covered in neat, precise script, but she was too far away to read them.

     She moved in for a closer inspection, pulling up to the desk she occupied in the classroom eight floors below.  It was just as she remembered it.  The faint ink stains from when she'd let her quill wander from the parchment were there, just visible in the wavering, uneven light.  So were the countless tiny nicks left by her cutting knife over endless hours of toil.  She reached out and caressed the smooth wood, the knot in her throat drawing ever tighter.  

     She tore her gaze from the desk and rolled to the cabinets where Professor Snape stored the cheap spare cauldrons.  No one ever used them except for Neville, though hardly a lesson passed when he didn't scurry to their cabinet, quailing beneath a malevolent glower from Professor Snape and the sting of a thirty-point deduction. 

     She leaned down with a grunt and opened it, gritting her teeth as the hinges emitted an ear-splitting squeak.  She peered inside to find a dozen pewter cauldrons arranged in neat rows.  She smiled at the reminder of the professor's pedantic neatness, but the flicker of amusement was quashed by the looming knowledge that he and his stiff Victorian pedantry might not be long for this world, may in fact have left it already.

     "What are you doing?" Neville asked, as she reached for one of the cauldrons with a trembling hand.

     "What I always do," she snapped, pulling the jittering cauldron onto her lap and slamming the door.

     She went to the professor's desk and picked up the pieces of parchment, careful not to draw too close and scratch the finish.  Her head knew that it wasn't really his desk or his room, that she was in a room she had never seen before with Neville Longbottom, a room that only appeared when needed, according to him, but the illusion was so complete that her heart didn't care.  As far as it was concerned, this _was_ the Potions classroom, and she had a job to do.

     "Neville?"

     "Yeah?"

     "Count off three minutes, please."

     "Why?"

     "I can't explain now.  Just humor me."

     "All right, I'm starting now," he said dubiously.

     She tore the parchment into pieces and wadded it into balls, her movements slow and methodical.  She wanted them to be just right.  The fact that he wasn't here to see it didn't give her an excuse to do shoddy work.  The harsh purr of tearing paper filled the otherwise silent room, and it soothed her jangling nerves and roiling stomach.  It was a good sound, a normal sound, and she clung to the illusion of normalcy it offered.  _Rip.  _The coarse edges of the paper against her palm as she crumpled it.  Everything in its place.

     "Three minutes."  Neville's voice, timid in the shadows.

     Her head snapped to where he stood, his quiet proclamation startling her from her cocoon.  She was angry at him, _furious.  _He had broken the spell, jolted her from the place she had built for herself to stave off the monstrous confusion that threatened to swamp her teetering defenses.  It didn't matter that she had told him to interrupt her; he should have known better.  It wasn't fair.  It wasn't right.

     _None of this is fair or right.  Life isn't that way, and it never has been.  Why should things be different now?  Change of place doesn't always equal change of fortune.  Just because you're in a fairytale castle doesn't mean you get to be the princess.  So get a grip and stiffen your spine._

She took a deep breath and forced her fisted hands to relax.  Her grandfather was right.  Whatever was happening to Professor Snape, whatever _had_ happened to him, it was none of Neville's doing, and yelling at him served no purpose.  

     "Thank you."  She forced her teeth to unclench.  "Take these and put them in that wastebin, please."  She thrust the crumpled bits of parchment at him.

     "All right."  He took them from her, his warm hands brushing against her frozen fingers.  He flashed her an uncertain smile as he turned and tossed them into the wastebin beside Professor Snape's desk.

     _That look says it all.  You can read his face like a billboard.  _Mad as a hatter, proceed with caution_.  Holy creeping Jesus.  How long until he sends for the orderlies at St. Mungo's?_

     When he had thrown the last bit away, she said, "Start the count again."

     "The count?"

     "Three minutes."

     When she was sure he'd started again, she reached down and fished out the balls of parchment, cramming them into her cauldron to line the bottom.  All the while, she felt the weight of Neville's disbelieving eyes on her scalp, and she wished it belonged to another pair of eyes, eyes blacker than coal and bright as burnished onyx.  She swallowed with a ragged click.

     _Steady, girl, steady.  Go to pieces now, and you'll be picking the paper out of the trash for the rest of the night, because you'll never get any further._

When the wastebin was empty, she straightened with a muffled groan, closing her eyes against a cramp in her lower back.

     "You all right?" Neville asked, his eyebrows knitted in concern.

     "Yes," she answered, with more asperity than she intended.  "Just cramps.  They happen all the time."

     She turned away from the desk and the wastebin, went to the blackboard, and picked up the pointer stick.  Then she rolled to the shelves containing the common potions stores.  Cauldron tucked securely against her stomach, she set about gathering the ingredients for the Camoflous Draught, her body falling easily into the familiar pattern of reaching, grabbing, and placing.

     "How much time, Neville?" she asked without taking her eyes off the assortment of jars and phials in front of her.

     "Um, thirty seconds, I think."

     She grunted in acknowledgement, irritated by his vagueness.  _Thirty seconds, I think.  _How hard could it be to watch an hourglass?  There were thirty seconds left or there weren't.  It wasn't rocket science or potion-making.  She bit her tongue to stifle an acid remark.  If she wanted a confidant, especially one for a sensitive situation like this, it wouldn't do to offend him.

     _More flies with honey than with vinegar._

     She couldn't hope for Professor Snape's precision from sweet, bumbling Neville, much as she might wish it, so she consigned herself to best guess and finished collecting her ingredients.  She rolled to her desk in silence.

     "What are you doing?"  Neville sat atop the desk beside her, his wand in his lap.

     "I told you.  What I always do," she said tersely, and set out her jackal meat.

     "Oh."

     "Turn the hourglass and count forty-five minutes."  She was tired of false pleasantry.

     _If he asks me why, I'm going to strangle him, confidant be damned._

He slid off the desk, crept to the hourglass, and turned it over with a careful flick of the wrist.  Then he returned to his perch and rested his wand across his knees.  "You do this every night?"

     "Yes."  She did not look at him.

     She gritted her teeth as she worked and wished with every fiber of her being that it wasn't Neville who was with her, but Professor Snape, tall and thin-lipped and graceful in his billowing black robes.  She waited to hear his nightshade voice slice across the quiet gloom, laced with contempt.  _Clop.  Clop.  _She deliberately scraped her knife across the wood, and the dull scratch of metal harrowing pine filled the room.  But no scathing reproach sounded from behind the professor's unoccupied desk.

     "Dammit!" she shouted, and slammed her knife onto the desk so hard that it rebounded and clattered to the floor.

     "Rebecca, what-," Neville cried in alarm, and he reached for her shoulder.

     "Don't!  Don't touch me," she snarled, and he recoiled at the sudden venom in her voice.

     She shoved the potion ingredients aside and rested her forehead on the cool desktop, the sting of reluctant tears burning her tear ducts like mild acid.  Her chest hitched, and a strangled hiccup of grief escaped her.

     "I never thought the room was _that_ awful," Neville said, and the honest bewilderment in his voice made her snort with unexpected laughter.

     "The room?  You think that's what upset me?"  She sat up and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her robe, leaving a damp, glistening trail.  She frowned at it and dropped her arm to her side.  "Hardly.  This was what I asked for."  Her red, swollen eyes darted to the empty chair behind the desk at the front of the room.  "Almost," she amended bitterly.

     "You asked for Professor Snape's classroom?"  He sounded as if she'd just told him she enjoyed setting fire to newborn puppies.  "Why?"

     She shrugged, an inelegant, abrupt hunching of her rounded shoulders.  There was no way to explain to Neville, who hated and feared Professor Snape only slightly less than Potter did, the comfort she drew from this room and the man who had made it his private fiefdom.  It was cold and drab, and he was unyielding and utterly pitiless, but it was a haven to her all the same, the one place in this sprawling castle where the fluid, catch-as-catch-can rules of magic were absolute, where she knew the rules of the game beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt.

     "I just feel safe here."

     He looked at her, then gazed at the damp walls and the light that never seemed to reach them.  "Here?  I'd feel safer in a tomb."  He shuddered.

     She grunted noncommittally.  She hadn't expected anything different.  He had no reason to care about this room.  To him, it was just a classroom, his least favorite classroom.  Five years of insults and cruelty had been heaped upon him in this room.  That it had been in the name of preparing him for the grim realities of these solid, shielding walls made little difference.  Cruelty was cruelty, and that was that.  Not too long ago, she had felt the same, trembling in knock-kneed fear at the very though of this place and its sour warden.  She knew better now, though the price for her awareness had been steep.

     "How did you find this place?" she asked, neatly sidestepping philosophical polemic for the time being.  She scrubbed her hands over her face, pressing her fingertips into the flesh of her jaw in a futile attempt to ease the throbbing ache there.

     "I need a place to go sometimes.  To think."

     She had never heard him sound so melancholy.  She shifted in her seat, uncomfortable with seeing him so dispirited.  He was always so cheerful around her and Seamus that it had never occurred to her that he might have skeletons of his own.  After all, he walked about on two sturdy legs, attracted no undue notice from the others except when at the hub of a Potions cataclysm, and was not expected to hoist the world onto his plump shoulders.  What could possibly trouble him?  So she had thought until now.

     It was a stupid stance to take, she realized, the stance of a self-absorbed fool so intent upon her own path that she noticed nothing around her.  Evidence that a healthy body did not equal a life free of regret or lingering suffering was all around her.  One look into Professor Snape's haunted, dead eyes had told her that.  In fact, the stark anguish of his silent hopelessness had toppled the iron walls of her resistance in one fell swoop.  And yet, somewhere along the way, she had forgotten that lesson, disregarded it because it was too frightening to contemplate.

     Back at D.A.I.M.S., the ability to walk, to move without hindrance from one's own body was the cure for all the ills that befell them.  They would sit in a loose, informal circle in the Reading Room and discuss all the things they would do if granted sudden liberation from their twisted, gnarled limbs.  They would leap up, naturally, and caper and dance until no breath remained in their brittle bodies.  They would run until there was no more earth beneath their feet and revel in the hot, needling stitch that sank its teeth into their heaving sides and the burning heat of overstretched calves, and then they would throw back their heads and raise their hands to the sky and laugh.

     With their newfound freedom would come wisdom.  The old confusions would drift away, brought to heel by the power of movement and the glorious epiphanies wrought by sore and well-used feet.  Uncertainty and formless anger would forsake them, and in their stead would be confidence and peace.  There would be no more cowering in dark, cramped corners so as not to offend the hale with their shriveled, pallid bodies, mo more timorous, disingenuous apologies for having the audacity to live.  They would live and be proud of it, and they would not avert their faces from curious eyes.

     They knew this utopian vision of able-bodied paradise was ridiculous.  They had spent more than enough time on D.A.I.M.S.' front lawn in the spring and fall and beneath its shady, if not hideous, salmon awning in the summer torpor observing the passersby as they sunned themselves to realize their folly.  They saw the pettiness, cruelty, and mind-boggling selfishness so-called "normal" people perpetrated on one another, but they chose to ignore it, told themselves that, were they granted such a gift, they would never abuse it.  After all, _they_ had once lived in the unwatched shadows and knew what it was like not to matter.

     Now, sitting beside her with his wand in his lap and his chin resting on his folded hands, Neville had destroyed that lofty notion for good and true.  What little hope for its ultimate truth not destroyed by Deidre Clapham and her successor was crushed by the lost, exhausted expression on his face, an expression she had never taken the time to notice before because she had been too preoccupied with her own concerns.

     Her tongue, so quick and vital with the need to cut just moments ago, suddenly felt dull and heavy in her mouth.  She wasn't sure she had the right to ask him what it was he needed to ponder alone, but she couldn't see how to _not_ ask.  She shifted again, stiffening at a twinge in her back, and rubbed a clammy finger over her forearm. 

     "Think about what?" she ventured.

     "Things.  My parents."  He did not elaborate.

     She made no answer.  She couldn't think of one.  She understood what it was like to have secrets that were entirely your own, memories and events that were for you and God and none of the world's damn business.  She did not press him further.

     They sat in awkward silence for several minutes before he spoke.  "So, why aren't you all right?"  He picked up a ball of parchment from her desk and rolled it between his hands.

     Another shrug.  "I just can't be there now."

     "The Gryffindor Common Room?"

     "Yeah.  I don't understand how they can all be so happy."

     "Professor Snape is a miserable old git.  He hasn't exactly made friends," Neville pointed out.  No accusation, only simple statement of fact.

     "I know that."  She rolled her eyes.  "How could I not?  But I don't think he deserves to die for it."  Irritation crept back into her voice.

     "I never said that."

     She rounded on him.  "Yes, you did.  One day at breakfast, you told the twins, Seamus, and me that you wished someone would kill him," she snapped, anger rising in her throat and coating her tongue with acid.

     He goggled at her, and then he shut his mouth with a snap, a guilty flush creeping into his cheeks,  "I didn't really mean that," he sighed, and harrowed his fingers through his hair.  "He just gets me so mad sometimes.  Nothing I ever do is right or good enough.  He's always putting me down."  His voice rose with every word.  "He likes it you know, thinks it's funny.  I see it in his face, in his eyes.  Well, it isn't.  I can't help it that I'm rotten at Potions.  What else could I be, with him breathing down my neck all the time?"  He was nearly shouting.  Then, as though he were coming out of a trance, his shoulders slumped.  "Course, according to Gran, I'm rotten at everything," he muttered.

     Being surprised by Neville Longbottom was becoming a regular occurrence, and to cover her confusion, she studied her hands.  She'd always known that Neville disliked Professor Snape; there weren't many who _didn't_, but she had never suspected this deep and potent reservoir of bitterness.  She supposed she should have, given the spectacular malice Professor Snape showed him at every possible opportunity, but after his sweet concern for her on the first day of Potions and subsequent counsel to not let the Potions Master get her down, she had presumed that he'd found a measure of acceptance.  Obviously not.

     He was right, of course.  Professor Snape saved the choicest maledictions for him and made certain that the entire class heard them.  He snapped and snarled at him without provocation, and he seemed to relish every mishap, great or small.  Yet for all of that, she couldn't stop seeing his tired face hunched over a stack of parchment and aged fifteen years by the milky glow of the torches or shut out the incredulous misery etched on his face in the millisecond after Harry's collapse, when the world had ground to an unceremonious halt and he had found himself staring into the unified face of foregone conclusion.

     "I still don't understand how they can be so giddy about it," she insisted.

     "He's had it coming, and besides, they don't understand."  Neville folded his arms across his chest and hunched his shoulders, as though he were trying to shielding himself from a sudden gust of frigid wind.

     "Understand what?"

     "What will happen to him."

     "And you do?"  She had meant it as harmless inquiry, but weariness and anger made it snide.

     His lips thinned.  "I've got a good idea."

     "Sorry, Neville," she said, and held her hands up in a placatory gesture.  "Didn't mean it that way.  I'm just…tired."

     He nodded.

     "What will they do to him?" she asked, not wanting to hear the answer.

     "He'll be Kissed."

     "I know.  Seamus told me Dementors sucked out your soul, but what does that mean?"

     "Just what it sounds like."

     "Does the body die?"

     "I don't know for sure, but I don't think so," he answered slowly.  "I think your body keeps on going-breathing and blinking and shambling around.  I went to Azkaban once with my Gran, and I saw some of the prisoners.  They looked right at me, but they never blinked, and their eyes were empty.  They dribbled and sicked on themselves, but they never noticed, just kept on bumping into the doors of their cells and staring at me."

     She stared at him, horrified.  "W-Why would you go to a place like that?" she stammered.

     "Gran wanted to talk to Professor Moody, I think.  Only then he wasn't a professor.  He was an Auror.  Don't know what for."

     "What about your parents?"

     Neville paled, and his mouth worked, and she knew instantly that she had ventured into forbidden territory.

     "Never mind.  Not my business," she said hastily, knowing there was no graceful exit.  "These Dementors, what are they?"

     "They're sick," he muttered, avoiding her eyes.  "They're in St. Mungo's.  Death Eaters tortured them.  I was there, but I don't remember it."

     It took a moment for it to register in her churning brain that he was referring to his parents and not Dementors.  "Oh."  She felt small and lost.  There was nothing she could say to make it better.  She had learned early that pithy platitudes offered no comfort to the grieving.  "I'm sorry.  Hospitals are terrible."

     _Oh, outstanding.  He'll take that gem to his grave, _she berated herself.

     "That was extraordinarily lame," she said, and fought the inexplicable urge to titter.

     "Yeah, it was," he agreed.

     He doubled over and exhaled into his knees, and for a panic-stricken moment, she thought he was weeping.  Then he raised his head, and she saw that he was laughing, great soundless chuffs of air.  

     "You're an oracle, you are.  How would I ever have guessed that hospital was awful without you?" he cackled, rocking back and forth on the desk.

     She yodeled laughter, clamping a clawed hand over her mouth and howling at the ceiling.  She knew this was not healthy laughter, the carefree laughter of teenagers in a secret hideout sharing secrets and vulgar jokes; it was the laughter of people clinging precariously to their place in a world gone mad, but she didn't care.  It felt good to laugh and to do it with someone else.  Shared laughter meant it wasn't the baying of a lunatic.  So she pressed the hand not covering her mouth against her knee and shrieked laughter until her throat ached and tears streamed down her red face.

     Several minutes passed before they regained a semblance of composure.  The baying tapered to choked sniggers as they wiped their wet faces and clutched their bellies, hot and sprung from their bout of hysteria.

     "That is some of the most practical advice I've ever gotten about my parents, though," he conceded between ripples of exhausted mirth.

     "Glad to help.  I'll be here all week.  Eighty Galleons per half hour."  She wagged her finger at him.  She felt drunk, giddy after their shared mirth, but the feeling was eroding quickly, displaced by remembrance of why they were there.

     "A bargain, that," he snorted, but his smile faded.

     She picked up her cauldron, looked inside at the yawning emptiness, and put it down again.  "What if he didn't do it?"  

     "Who, Snape?  You mean, what if he didn't poison Harry?"  He scratched the underside of his nose with the side of his finger.

     "Yes."  Her finger resumed its dreamy drift over her forearm.

     "Come on, Rebecca, who else would be smart enough to poison Harry?  And who else would know how to get into that bleeding cabinet of his?  He's been after Harry for years, and he finally got him."

     "I know, I know.  Everything you say makes sense, but I still don't think he did it.  If he's smart enough to do that, then why would he be stupid enough to poison Harry in front of witnesses?  Why not slip it to him when no one realized?"

     Neville pondered this.  "I don't know," he said at last, and stretched.  "Maybe he just couldn't wait."

     She snorted.  Of all the things Professor Snape had ever struck her as, blindly impetuous was not one of them.  It didn't add up.  "But, Neville, didn't you see his eyes?"

     "I see them all the time, and they're always the same-empty of everything except hateful spite."  He fisted his hand in front of his mouth to stifle a yawn.

     She sighed.  This was getting nowhere.  As much as Neville might like her, he wasn't going to believe Professor Snape was innocent.  He had been the brunt of unfounded torment too long to forgive so easily.

     She squared her shoulders.  "I better clean up," she said stiffly, and began gathering the jars and phials on her desk, most of which had never been touched.

     _It's funny how two people can look at the same thing and see two different things._

_     He's Gryffindor.  The world is either absolute black or absolute white.  No grey, no exceptions, no maybe.  He sees what experience tells him to expect.  Would you have seen anything different in his shoes?_

     "Listen, it's not like I want to see Professor Snape get his soul sucked out, but he did this to himself."

     "I don't want to discuss it anymore," she nearly shouted, on the verge of tears again.  She knew she was being unfair and childish, but she suspected she was going to be called upon to act far more adult than she ever wanted to before the dust settled, and she wanted one last chance to behave as a child.

     Soon everything was returned to its place except the rosehip phial.  Professor Snape had always replaced it on the topmost shelf, staunch in his refusal to allow her the use of magic.  She thought about leaving it on the professor's desk, but her mind, entrenched in the well-established routine, balked.

     She turned to Neville.  "Could you Banish this to the top shelf, please?" she asked brusquely.

     He shuffled his feet.  "I'm awful at Banishing Charms, but I'll take it over."  He took the phial from her cold, outthrust hand and replaced it on the shelf.

     "How do we get out of here?"  She concentrated on the floor.

     "Just open the door."  He stepped forward, twisted the knob, and the door swung open to admit strong torchlight, bright after the gloom of the misplaced Potions classroom.

     They crept out, blinking and squinting, moles forsaking shadowy, hidden burrows, and hurried toward the portrait of the Fat Lady, who snored daintily in her frame.  Neither of them spoke. 

     "Bugger, I've forgotten the password," Neville swore when they reached her.

     "_Leonis obscurus,"_ she mumbled, and the Fat Lady opened her bleary eyes long enough to let them enter.  The snoring resumed before the portrait swung closed.

     "Well, goodnight, then," Neville whispered, reverent of the stillness.

     "'Night."  She flapped her hand at him and ascended the stairs to the girls' dormitory, moving slowly so the constant growl of her chair did not rouse the others.

     Winky was waiting for her, her tiny voice murmuring gentle admonishments as she undressed her.  She only half-listened, too tired to care.  She knew them all by heart.  House elf or human, the words were the same.  Too late, too cold, too dangerous, not old enough or well enough, what did she think she was doing?  Neat, harmless words, that when bound in that fashion created a gilded cage from which she could not escape.

     For the first time in her life, she wondered if she wanted to, or, even if she did, whether she should.

      


	30. The Hour of Their Discontent

Chapter Thirty

     The Slytherin Common Room was in deliberate chaos.  Draco stood in the corner nearest the door, a pile of trampled parchment and assorted bric-a-brac at his feet.  He held the empty drawer that had once contained it all in his hands, his lips twisted into a frustrated snarl.  He tossed it aside with a snort and reached for the next one, his fingers curling gracefully around the tarnished pewter handle.

     "Get a move on, Goyle, those Ministry bastards will be along as soon as they can manage it," he snapped, and jerked the drawer from its housing.  Behind him, Goyle grunted and increased his pace from standstill to creeping ennui.

     Draco was sorely tempted to turn and lob the heavy wooden drawer at his thick, slab-like skull, but that would waste precious time, time they didn't have, so he shelved the idea in favor of dumping the contents of the drawer onto the plush Persian rug.  The next followed suit, and the next, and when all the drawers had been pried from their sockets like rotten teeth, he crouched and began to sort through the mess.

     Rubbish, all rubbish.  He hadn't expected to find anything, but there was no harm in being thorough.  He tossed aside a garbled love note dated three years past and rubbed his hands together in slow, contemplative circles.  The others were working, too, searching for anything that might incriminate Professor Snape.  Pansy was by the fireplace, her back mercifully turned to him as she fed suspicious papers into the crackling hearth.  Most of it was personal correspondence from "Master" Parkinson, as he fancied himself, and he had no doubt that Ministry officials would find them most interesting.

     He watched for a moment as the voracious, licking flames devoured the Parkinson family secrets, then returned his attention to the mound at his feet.  Muffled scrapings and thumps sounded from overhead, and from the corner of his eye, he saw Crabbe pause in his riffling of Housemates' satchels to gaze up in befuddlement.  He swore under his breath.  He'd be lucky to dispose of anything with this lot.  Not a brain between them.

     "Crabbe," he hissed through clenched teeth.  "Compelling though it may be to listen to the prehistoric thrashings of Millicent Bulstrode, you're wasting time."

     Crabbe started and spared him a furtive, sidelong glance.  "Sorry, Draco," he muttered, and his blocky, trollish hands resumed their indelicate work.

     Draco shifted on his haunches, and his knee emitted an indecorous pop.  His hands descended on the pile again, and his keen grey eyes inventoried everything at a glance, assessing worth in the blink of an eye.  His first impulse had been to destroy everything, burn it all, leave nothing whatsoever for them to find, but it had occurred to him that finding nothing could prove more damning than finding anything short of a confession written in the professor's hand and signed with his blood.  They'd _know_ the room had been cleaned, know they were hiding something, and if they couldn't discern precisely what that was, they would gladly invent a sin with which to condemn their Head of House.  Upstanding Ministry officials were only too happy to pillory a Slytherin whenever they could.

     _They seem to leave your father alone well enough._

_     Yes, well, as I've said before, money heals all wounds._

     It wasn't as it they hadn't _tried _to bring him down.  His mother was ever boring him with the same tired tales of Ministry harassment after His Lordship's fall.  As soon as he was old enough to pull himself upright on the hem of her gown, she recounted the horrors of Father's trial, entrapping him in an overstuffed parlor chair and plying him with biscuits to buy his silence while she twittered inexorably about the Ministry's ineptitude and ill-disguised prejudice against Slytherins and Purebloods smart enough to know the dangers Muggles and Mudbloods posed.

     Weary as he had grown of his mother's prattle, he was sure the story wasn't far from the mark.  He'd been a mere infant at the time of his father's trial-which his mother vehemently referred to as The Persecution-but the Flourish and Blott's periodicals archive was well-stocked and open to the public, and he had spent many an afternoon in the summer after his first year entrenched amid the musty, moldering stacks inhaling ancient dust and reading of the trial for himself.

     He supposed he could have spared himself the trouble, tedium, and grime by simply asking his father, but he had wanted to see it in black and white, view it from the enemy perspective.  His father never asked where he went during those long, stuporous summer afternoons.  He had been too busy organizing and regrouping Voldemort's scattered forces after his spectacular defeat at the hands of Potter.  It was likely he never noticed his long absences, and even if he had, it wouldn't have mattered.  As long as he was accompanied by Crabbe and Goyle, he could go wherever he pleased.

     For a week that summer, he sat cross-legged on the floor, nestled awkwardly in a corner and all but buried beneath old issues of the _Daily Prophet, _learning the truth as the unwashed rabble saw it.  By the time he was finished, the tops of his hands were raw from constant rubbing, and his fingertips were gritty with newsprint.  Dust coated his nose and throat and misted on his wintry eyelashes.  But he had the knowledge he had sought, been dizzy with it.

     Things were much as his mother had said.  A week after the Dark Lord's defeat, Aurors had come to Malfoy Manor and arrested his father.  A picture on the front page of the 6 November issue had shown him, thin-lipped and regal, being led away while his mother watched, dry-eyed and bland.  He had been in his mother's arms, one tiny fist crammed into his mouth.  Three months after that, his father's trial had begun.

     The papers had been overflowing with lurid details of night raids on Mudblood homes and the savage butchery of Light supporters.  Sobbing survivors had recounted atrocities, each more horrifying than the next, sending trial observers into ecstasies of self-righteous rage.  When asked to identify the ringleaders, each had pointed a quavering finger at his father, and with each new accusation, the courtroom had seethed in anticipation of seeing a Kiss administered.

     That had not counted on his father's solicitor, who turned out to be a bitter, ingenious bastard as cunning as Salazar Slytherin himself.  One who actually paid dividends far exceeding their cost.  He had let the victims wail and keen and point their damning fingers at his client with nary a whisper of outrage.  As the days had stretched into one week and then two, he sat behind the defense table with his hairy, large-knuckled fingers tented beneath his jutting, square jaw and his squinting eyes riveted to the testimony box.  No matter how graphic the description, he never quailed, and he never, ever spared Lucius, lock-jawed and strapped into a chair in the center of the room, a glance.

     He hadn't gleaned all of this from the papers, of course.  Most of the intimate details had been gleaned from eavesdropping outside his father's study door on the nights when he invited one of his sycophantic lackeys to the Manor for drinks and strategizing.  Soon enough, after one too many swallows of brandy, the real talk would begin, his father's cultured, clipped voice seeping through the thick wood like perfumed fog, blunted by distance and too much drink.  The other never spoke, or if he did, Draco had never heard him, and in those rare few moments when his father's cautious tongue was loosened, he came to the truth.  As close as he was likely to get, anyway.

     After the prosecution rested its case with an eloquent oratory damning his father as a soulless, craven coward who had betrayed his world for his own gain-a statement that prompted a boisterous standing ovation from the gallery-his father's solicitor rose, walked to the center of the room with his hands clasped behind his back, stood beside his father's chair, turned to face the hostile gallery, and told them that Lucius Damocles Malfoy had done everything of which he was accused.

     There was a moment of dumbfounded silence, and then pandemonium erupted.  The chief solicitor for the prosecution leapt to his feet and accused the defense of trying to win a mistrial by virtue of incompetent representation.  A victim's widow swooned in the gallery and was nearly trampled by the seething mass of witnesses and unabashed gawkers hoping to see a tidy death.  The Chief Warlock pounded his gavel until it snapped, and when that did nothing to quell the surging mob, he beat upon the bench with his fist and bellowed for order.

     Through it all, his father's solicitor never moved.  He watched, and he waited, and when the crowd had spent its wrath and flustered Aurors had removed the most vocal of the onlookers and the unconscious widow, he continued as though there had been no interruption.  Mr. Malfoy, he told them, in a voice that dripped surety and rationality, had done those terrible deeds because he could not _not _do them.  He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named had usurped his will, forced a good and decent man of noble birth beneath his merciless yoke through the Imperius Curse.  His will and his mind were not, and had not been, his own, and under their laws, he could not be held morally or criminally responsible for any acts committed beneath its thrall.

     There were sputters of outrage from the prosecution and the gallery, but they did not change the intrinsic truth of his statement.  If a person had committed a crime while under magical duress upon his faculties, or while his will had been supplanted by the will of another through magical means, then he could not be held accountable for those actions, no matter how heinous or detrimental to the public.  In other words, if his father were under the influence of the Imperius Curse, then he could admit to every last atrocity and still leave the courtroom a free man.

     The legal wrangling and fallout had raged for a week, but in the end, his father walked down the Ministry steps, flanked by his wife and infant son and smirking as if the outcome had never been in doubt.  In truth, it hadn't been.  The moment his solicitor invoked the possibility of the Imperius Curse, there could only be one verdict.  It was the perfect defense.  While it could not be definitively proven that one was operating under Imperius, neither could it be disproved, and rather than risk sending an innocent man to his death, the court had no choice but to err on the side of caution and set him free.

     _The Light ensnared by its own lofty ideals.  Imagine that._

     He sneered as he sorted through the various crumpled, tattered parchments and forgotten trinkets strewn at his feet.  He picked up a cracked Remembrall, shook it, and dropped it again.  He thought of Longbottom, that simpering, fat twit from Gryffindor.  He was always getting them in his owl post, though Draco couldn't see why for all the good they did.  The brainless sod was constantly misplacing them, which defeated the entire purpose of having one.  Anyone who needed a Remembrall to find their Remembrall was a blithering idiot and had no business being at Hogwarts.

     Then again, the idea of standards had never troubled Dumbledore.  He let anyone with a wand through the school doors without a thought for the consequences.  Mudbloods, Squibs, half-breeds, and freaks, all, and he welcomed them without a care, with open arms.  Ridiculous.  And dangerous.  That brainless, lumbering oaf with the dubious title of Care of Magical Creatures Professor was a case in point.  He'd nearly cost him his arm with his bumbling ineptitude, and nothing had been done about it.  The bloody bird had been sent to its just reward, but Hagrid still had a job.

     Any feeble hopes that he might have learned better since then had vanished with the arrival of that wretched, cheeky transfer student.  Any wizard worth his robes could see that she was a disaster waiting to happen and an affront to the sensibilities, but Dumbledore refused to be swayed.  Professor Snape had spent the past two months waiting for his classroom to be blasted from beneath his feet while he tried to drag the loony Headmaster into the scalding light of reason, but the old man was intractable as the devil.

     Professor Snape.  There was no denying that he was in a great deal of trouble.  Fudge was a fool, and one didn't have to be a seer to realize that he had already determined the professor's guilt.  He was frothing to have him away to Azkaban, where he could torture him at his leisure, no doubt.  For all the hue and cry the Ministry raised about the evils of Unforgivables in public, they certainly had no aversion to using them and lesser hexes when it suited them.  His father still bore the scars of his brief internment there, thin, faint lines of bloodless, puckered flesh that winnowed from the pale curve of his shoulders to the small of his back.  

     There was little worry about him divulging sensitive information to the Aurors.  Professor Snape was a loyal follower, and he would kill himself before he betrayed his cause.  Not like, Father, who though he believed every tenet espoused by His Lordship, would turn from it the moment it was no longer prudent or profitable.  Father called it prudent strategy.  Draco called it prudent cowardice.

     _Cowardice or not, it saved you from a life of disreputable penury.  Had it not been for his shrewd renunciation non voce, Malfoy Manor and everything in it would have been ceded to the assets of the Ministry and ended up in the hands of Mudblood gentry.  As it is, one can hardly accuse you of bravery in the face of danger.  Left Potter in your dust that night in the Forbidden Forest._

     He had been eleven, not twenty-six, and he wasn't about to risk his skin for Potter when his father was busily weaving his noose.  No Malfoy would ever shed his blood for the sake of a Potter.  No Malfoy would shed his blood at all, if it could be helped.  It was too precious to waste on fruitless martyrdom and useless heroics.  In that instance, discretion had been the better part of valor.

     _And yet your father was a coward?  Bit selective in your application of the term, are you not?_

_     My right as a Slytherin._

     Questions about his father's character aside, he wondered why he'd done nothing to hinder the Ministry investigation.  Surely the owl had arrived in time?  His eagle owl was the fastest, most reliable in the school, and he could easily cover the distance from here to the Malfoy estate in a matter of days.  He should have arrived no later than last evening.  If it turned out that the beast had botched things, his feathers would be in Draco's pillow before he'd landed on the window eave.

     _That owl has never bollixed a delivery, not even in a driving blizzard.  If your father isn't here, it's because he's chosen not to be._

_     More selective cowardice, then?_

     If it were, it was an extremely inopportune time for him to misplace his usually formidable spine.  Malfoy family money and connections were Professor Snape's only hope.  The leeway extended to others accused of murder was not offered to Slytherins, especially not those suspected of being Death Eaters, and the professor, by virtue of his terminal misanthropy, had made sure even his Slytherin pupils preferred to leave well enough alone.

     He couldn't imagine his father refusing to help Snape.  It wouldn't sit well with the Dark Lord, for one thing.  His Lordship enforced a strict policy of group cohesion among the members of his inner circle.  Internecine personal squabbles were put aside in the name of achieving greater ends, and dissent was quashed with breakneck force.  That was, until His Lordship grew weary of someone within the ranks.  When that day came-and it always did-support was covertly, unceremoniously withdrawn, and the offender was abandoned to his fate, or, if the Fates seemed predisposed to kindness, throttled in his bed or assassinated in his tea garden along with his family and servants.

     _Maybe that day has finally come for the good professor, and your father is discreetly distancing himself.  He's always been able to smell blood in the water before anyone else.  It wouldn't be the first time._

He paused in the middle of crumpling a blank piece of parchment, his heart thudding painfully in his chest.  The thought made a horrible sense, but it couldn't be true.  According to his father, Professor Snape was a valuable member of the Dark Lord's inner council, their eyes and ears in this otherwise unbreachable castle.  They needed him and the information he provided, and they would until the coming war was over and Potter's bloody, defaced corpse lay crumpled at Lord Voldemort's victorious feet.

     Politics aside, he admired the professor and his discerning eye, not to mention his utter disregard for the established rules of etiquette.  He unleashed his poisoned wit on anyone he chose with no fear for repercussions or eventual comeuppance.  He thought his father did, as well.  Or had.  The professor had often been a guest for drinks at the Manor and attended the lavish summer dinner parties his father hosted.

     _He didn't come last summer.  Four parties, and he never came.  He stopped coming for cocktails, too.  Your father's owl delivered hundreds of cocktail invitations from June until the end of August, every single one of them penned in his graceful script, and none of them bore Professor Snape's name.  And you thought that was odd, because until then, an invitation a week had gone out.  _

He let the ball of parchment drop and rubbed his hands together.  His mouth was dry and his stomach was a heavy, shrunken ball.  Things were clicking into place in his mind, sliding home with a sound like rattling bones, and they were forming a chain of thought he did not wish to pursue.

     _If His Lordship has wearied of Professor Snape, who has proven to be of incomparable value, and who has never disavowed him, what will he do to Father, whose schemes have failed, and who claimed no willful affiliation with him?  What will he do to me?_

That didn't bear thinking about, and he was almost grateful when Millicent Bulstrode thundered down the stairs and clapped a sweaty, beefy hand on his shoulder.

     "Me and Dina didn't find anything," she told him between breathless pants.

     "Dina and _I_ found nothing," he corrected irritably, and shrugged her grimy hand from his shoulder.

     He dropped the parchment he'd been absently examining and sighed.  He hadn't expected to find anything.  Professor Snape was no fool, and he would never leave incriminating evidence lying about for the world to see.  He had just needed to do something.  _Anything_ but sit on his hands and wait for the next capricious whim of Fate to decide the House's direction.  There had been too much waiting, too much biding of time, too much acquiescence to Gryffindor will.  It wasn't right for such a proud House to suffer such subjugation without a whimper.  It was time for them to act, to prove that the Slytherin serpent still had fangs.

     Surge of inexplicable civic-mindedness aside, such inactivity reflected badly on him, on the family name.  Their wealth and powerful had made them the de facto student leaders of the House, though most of the time, they were content to bask in the grudging reverence and toadying of the title without doing anything to earn it.  His father had never organized so much as a Common Room party during his time here, and with Professor Snape at the helm, Draco had neither reason nor motivation to aspire to more.  

     _If His Lordship has truly singled the professor out for excommunication, now is not the best time to assert your claim.  Better to keep your mouth shut and your eyes open._

     Maybe so, but he couldn't bring himself to do it.  Professor Snape was too valuable a Slytherin to lose, and sending him to Ministry clutches unopposed went against his nature.  Malfoys never gave the other side what they wanted, no matter how useless and insignificant it was.  What was theirs remained theirs until they were finished with it, be it man, beast, or trinket, and Professor Snape was _his_ Head of House.  He'd be damned if they'd take him.

     _But His Lordship-_

     Didn't own him.  Not yet.  Not until the brand was seared into the flesh of his forearm and tears streamed down his cheeks like blood.  Until then, he was free to make his own decisions.  Besides, neither his father nor His Lordship had ordered him not to interfere.  If and when they did, he would leave it alone.  But galvanizing the Slytherins, who had spent far too long in the coddling, stultifying sway of their own apathy, would look splendid when it came time for his initiation.  It might even catch his father's notice.

     "Goyle, Crabbe, gather everyone and get them in here now," he ordered.  "And when you've finished, go watch for those damned Aurors.  Now that they've gotten the professor out of the way, they'll be frothing to take this place apart."  

     Professor Snape had never returned to the Common Room.  They had waited until dinner, glancing uneasily from their homework each time the portrait hole opened, and when he failed to turn up for his customary adjournment in his office, they had marched to the Great Hall in a stiff, formal line, stomachs and footfalls heavy with apprehension.  They had expected to see him in his seat in the Great Hall, but the magnificent chair had been empty, and it had dawned on all of them then that things were terrible indeed, the realization sweeping through their ranks like bitter winter chill and turning their warm suppers to frozen rubber in their mouths.

     One by one, Housemates trickled into the Common Room, coming from the dormitories and the lavatories.  Some clutched textbooks or satchels, but most came with nothing but their wands and a befuddled expression.  They perched themselves on sofas and chairs, and as they gathered around, all elbows and knees and black robes, they reminded him of clustering ravens-awkward, watchful, and silent.  Some of the younger ones sat cross-legged on the floor and clutched sofa pillows.

     He wasn't sure what he was going to say.  He'd never tried to assume leadership.  It had always been handed to him as a right of his bloodline.  He saw it ever day in the simpering, sycophantic worship of Crabbe and Goyle, a worship ensured by generous financial bonuses on Boxing Day.  He'd never tested it to see how far his supposed authority actually stretched.  Suppose he tried to assert control only to find it was an illusion, a farce in which his life of privilege had allowed him to indulge?  Did he really want to find out?

     Professor Snape's fate was already sealed.  Fudge would throttle him with his own hands if it came to it, and that barmy, biased fool, Dumbledore, wouldn't lift a finger to stop him.  He had been undercutting the professor's authority for years, particularly when it came to the blessed Gryffindors.  Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw could languish under his venomous lash until the sundering of the world, but let a Gryffindor feel the sting of his discipline, and along would come McGonagall or Dumbledore with a soothing balm of fifty points to Potter for blowing his nose to the tune of "God Save the Queen."

     _Then why bother?_

     Because they cannot have what is mine, and it's as good a way as any to hone my skills.  You can't take over the world if you can't even master a Common Room.

He smiled, a cold, cruel smirk that made a few of the first years squirm behind their shielding pillows and did not reach his eyes.  There was that, wasn't there?  As much as Malfoy tradition as blond hair.  Each Malfoy son wrested power and the family fortune from the cold, dead hands of their father.  Lucius had smothered his father in his bed and ordered his brothers assassinated.  One day, Draco would murder his father and claim his inheritance.  It was his duty as a proper Malfoy son.  

     He rose from his crouch and stepped lightly over the piles of parchment through which he had been sifting, the joints of his knees and hips popping like castanets as he stretched.  He stepped into the center of the room and smirked at the circle of upturned faces.  They were waiting for him to speak.  He was the center of attention, and a wave of excitement and smug pleasure cramped his groin, made him stiffen in his trousers.  He deftly shifted his weight to conceal the bulge from wandering eyes.

     When he was sure all were present, he began to circle in their midst, his stride an unconscious emulation of his father, long and sinuous and swathed in inveterate confidence.  "Everything you were doing before now no longer matters," he said.

     "What?  Why?" demanded a thin, button-nosed fifth-year.  "We've got O.W.L.S."

     "And I've got N.E.W.T.S.," huffed a seventh-year girl afflicted with gargantuan buck teeth and a nearly solid brown mask of freckles.  There were murmurs of assent.

     He scowled at her.  "And as of this afternoon, you have no Head of House," he snapped.  "Or did you think the incident in Potions was a mass hallucination?"  He fixed his cool, grey eyes on the whinging fifth-year and was gratified when he reddened and dropped his gaze. 

     "What can we do?"  The freckled girl again.  "Dumbledore will take care of things."

     Draco's mouth twisted into a contemptuous sneer.  "Dumbledore?  You place your faith in Dumbledore?"  He eyed her in frozen disgust.  "With naiveté like that, how did you end up in Slytherin?  That old fool only cares about Gryffindor and precious Potter.  Without Professor Snape as our Head of House, he can do as he likes with us.  Who knows who he'll appoint as interim Head of House?  What if he gives us over to Trelawney?  Or that mongrel, Flitwick?"

     "But they're not even Slytherin!" protested Pansy shrilly.  "It's against the rules.  The Head of House must have been a member of the House over which he presides."

     "How astute of you, Parkinson" he drawled, careful to use her surname, lest she think he was flirting.

     _Useless precaution there, I'm afraid, _said a doleful voice inside his head.  _As smitten as she is, spitting on her would be taken as foreplay._  

     The voice was right.  Despite his obvious sarcasm, she was staring at him with misty, rapt adulation.  She reminded him of a pole-axed mooncalf.  He quickly turned away.  "Since when has our esteemed Headmaster given a damn about the rules?  Oh, he makes a great show of them, but he bends and twists them any way he chooses.  Remember the House Cup five years ago?" 

     There were disgruntled mutterings from those students old enough to remember the House Cup scandal.  It was still a sore spot with the professor, and anyone with a modicum of sense knew not to broach the subject in his presence.  Sly, it had been, and humiliating.  Dumbledore had let them think they had won the House Cup, and then, at the last moment, in full view of the other Houses, added just enough points to the Gryffindor total to let them snatch it from Slytherin's deserving grasp.  Professor Snape had been seething when he handed the coveted trophy to the unbearably smug McGonagall.

     The things Draco remembered most about that day, though, were the triumphant gleam in Dumbledore's eyes and the cacophonous cheers of the other Houses as Slytherin was stripped of what was its by right.  They had pounded the tabletops and stood upon the chairs, applauding the disingenuously modest Gryffindors, oblivious to the blatant fact that Dumbledore had wronged them just as much.  After all, Gryffindor had been in fourth place at the Leaving Feast.  In wresting glory from Slytherin and giving it to Gryffindor, he had disregarded their achievements as well, meaningless as they had been.  Yet they had celebrated.  Sitting in his place at the Slytherin table and watching them exult in the corrupted, fraudulent triumph of the clay-footed lion with bovine exuberance, he had realized that his father was right.  In that moment, his choice to follow the Dark Lord had been made with a glad and fervent heart.

     "But what can we do?"  Millicent, hunkered on the arm of the sofa, her wand pinched between her knees.

     "What we do best.  Wait.  Watch.  Create as much difficulty for the Ministry officials as we can.  Write to your parents.  Tell whatever lies you must to convince them to rail at the Ministry.  Nothing is too inflammatory, too taboo.  Create chaos and doubt.  Start rows.  Anything to keep them off guard.  We need to create time to find a scapegoat."

     "But why?  If he did it?"  A second-year near the front.

     "Because, you twit, I'll be damned if a Gryffindor is going to decide my fate.  And the professor is too valuable."

     "Too valuable for what?"  

     "If you have to ask, you weren't meant to know," he snapped.  "Any questions?"

     "When do we start?" Millicent asked.

     He wasn't surprised.  She reveled in bullying and intimidation.  Hardly a day passed when she couldn't be found divesting a cowering Hufflepuff of their care package from home or the Galleons they had set aside for a trip to Hogsmeade.  She seemed brighter in those moments, more vital, as though she had found her true calling.  Maybe she had.  Her finest hour, he thought, had been the melee during Lockhart's doomed Dueling Club in second year.  She'd had Mudblood Granger in a headlock, and as she'd lurched across the floor with her adversary's bushy head lodged in her sweaty and pungent armpit, her beatific expression had made her oddly mesmerizing.

     He tapped his chin with a long, lily forefinger.  "We should know what we're up against by morning.  By tomorrow night at the latest.  No doubt Dumbledore will want to keep this sordid mess quiet, so get the owls out as soon as you can, before either he or Fudge decrees a moratorium or screening of the post."

     The group broke up then, some talking in low, excited voices, but the majority grave and silent.  Confusion and illicit excitement warred on their faces.  Many had dreamed of bucking the establishment, of confronting the superior, complacent demagogues that trampled them underfoot and ignored their rights and goal in the interest of fairness, but none had dared attempt it.  Now the fantasy had come to life, and they could scarce believe it.

     _They think it's a grand adventure, most of them._

     _Doesn't matter what they believe.  All that matters is what they're willing to do, how far they're willing to go.  If fancies and ridiculous heroic daydreams get the results I need, so be it.  The ends justify the means._

     "Bulstrode," he called.

     She paused, one foot on the stone riser leading to the girls' dormitory.  "Yeah?"

     "Tell Crabbe and Goyle to come inside.  They'll stand out there like fenceposts all night otherwise."

     She guffawed.  "Thick as bricks, they are," she agreed, and went to the portrait hole.

     The irony of Millicent Bulstrode calling someone thick was not lost on him, but he stifled the sardonic retort poised on the tip of his tongue and settled on an aloof smirk.  He was going to need her muscle before the end, and it was best to keep her happy and willing to act quickly.

     Crabbe and Goyle clambered through the portrait hole and shambled to their preordained positions at his flank.  "Need something, Draco?" grunted Crabbe.

     "Clean up this mess."  He gestured to the piles of parchment he had dumped from the drawers.  "Then get some sleep.  If you drown in your morning porridge, you'll be of no use whatever."

     He left them as they began to gather the mess and toss it haphazardly into the first available drawer, and ascended the stairs to the boys' dormitory.  His mind was awash in thoughts and half-formed strategies, and he needed solitude to sort through them.  This was a high stakes game, and he had no intention of losing it.  

     At half-past six the following morning, a bevy of school owls left the owlery, one bearing a letter bound for Malfoy Manor in its clutching talons.  The Slytherin counterattack had begun. 


	31. Dancers, Take The Floor

Chapter Thirty-One

     The Hogwarts that greeted dawn and the bewildered students shambling down the Great Staircase into the Great Hall was not the Hogwarts that had seen Rebecca into her comfortless bed the night before.  Eyes gummy with the desiccated revenants of sleep, they clustered at the bottom of the staircase, their whispers of dismayed astonishment rippling through the frozen bottleneck like creeping tendrils of woodsmoke.  Somewhere in the front, a girl gasped softly, and Rebecca, sandwiched between Seamus and George, flinched.

     _It sounded like a death rattle._

     She snorted and rubbed her cold palms over her gritty, scalded eyes.  There had been no sleep for her last night.  Her mind had refused to close up shop, had clung to nebulous worries and intuitive suppositions with tenacious, unyielding fingers.  Scenario after scenario, each bleaker and more desolate than the last, had unspooled in the vibrant theater of her imagination.  No matter which way she had turned in her bed, the images followed her, lurid and terrible.  Blood in shining pools and wolves with scarlet teeth.  At four in the morning, her long-mutinous stomach had rebelled, and she had vomited soundlessly over the edge of her bed.  

     She'd spent the rest of the night in the tub and then the Common Room, watching the sunrise.  The light washed over the land like blood, and she found no comfort in it.  She'd wrangled with the encroaching demons of doubt and fear and the terror coiling around her spine until nearly seven, when Seamus had staggered down the boys' dormitory stairs.

     He stood beside her now, and though she usually preferred to keep her distance, she was grateful for his presence, for the simple, deceiving solidity of young boy.  She closed her eyes and inhaled the clean, crisp scent of shaving cream and laundry soap and scrubbed skin.  The heated throb in her head receded.

     "Can you see anything?" she asked, and was startled at the raw, jagged rasp in her voice.

     He craned his neck and stretched on tiptoes in an attempt to see over the milling mass of bodies.  "No.  It's too bloody crowded.  And Goyle, the git, won't move his blasted head."  He said this last loudly enough to carry over the throng.

     She frowned and pressed her lips into a tight line, waiting for the unintelligible retort that experience and rules of the eternal duel said must come, but there came nothing, not even a dismissive snort.  Her stomach, a sour, rancid ball inside her abdomen, lurched, and she swallowed a gag.  She and Seamus exchanged uneasy glances.  If Slytherin wasn't rising to freely offered Gryffindor bait, then the world as they knew it had come to an end.

     _I think it has, girl._

_     They're here, aren't they?  The wolves at the door have gotten in._

     Panic seized her.  She didn't want to see what awaited her at the end of this road.  Not now.  Not ever.  Her tongue cramped inside her mouth, and her heart thudded against her ribcage.  Her hands clenched into tight fists, and a sheen of sticky sweat coated her fingers.  She reached out and clutched her joystick in a desperate spasm.  She wanted out of here-away-right now.  

     "I-I need to go," she stammered, sure she was going to faint or throw up.  _Anxiety attack.  Whee.  _She tittered.  Groping blindly, she put the chair in reverse and was shocked when she bumped into something solid.

     "Ow.  Watch it!" 

     She twisted in her seat and saw a seventh-year Ravenclaw scowling and massaging his offended shin.  His disapproval deepened when he caught her gaze.

     "Watch where you're going.  Just because you're crippled doesn't give you the right to bash into people.  Five points from Gryffindor," he sniffed, and as he turned his head, she saw the conspicuous, pompous gleam of a Prefect badge.

     "Sorry," she murmured, an embarrassed flush warming her cheeks.  She wasn't, but all things considered, she thought it best to practice a bit of Gryffindor falsity.  A harmless verbal spat could easily escalate out of control.  The air was thick with barely suppressed tension, an unseen tripwire waiting to be triggered.

     He only scoffed and dismissed her with a pointed glance over her head.  _Dismissed, little toad._  She bit the inside of her cheek to quell an enthusiastic invitation for him to go fuck himself and wrenched the hand wrapped around her joystick back to the numb confines of her lap.  There was nowhere to go.  The stairs were clogged with groggy, confused students, and each time a path through the sea of swirling black revealed itself, it was swallowed as more joined the swelling tide.

     She was trapped, trapped like a lamb in the killing chute of the slaughterhouse.  She could not retreat, not stay the inevitable, stealthy surge forward.  She was moving toward the preordained endpoint.  To do otherwise would mean being crushed by the insatiable need to progress, regardless of what each advancement meant.  The Ravenclaw she had jostled earlier stumbled into her push handles and swore under his breath.  She inched onward, and with each turn of her wheels, she found it more difficult to breathe, and her heart was galloping beneath her breast.

     _I can't get out, Grandpa.  I want to get out._

_     There is no getting out.  You're in it now, for good or for ill._

_     In what?  In what?_

_     You know what._

She bowed her head and swallowed a mouthful of hot spittle.  She thought she did.  Whatever or whoever was responsible for this jarring change of the established order had everything to do with Professor Snape.  With what they thought he had done to Potter.  This slow, disorganized pilgrimage to breakfast was the beginning of the game, the traitorous flap of a butterfly's ephemeral wings that would send its monstrous, destroying ripples to the far ends of her already ravaged emotional landscape.  

     _Maybe it's the end.  Maybe you're going to see the aftermath.  A school-wide wake.  _

     That possibility drove a miserable whimper from her throat, and she cast a furtive glance to either side to see if any of her companions had noticed, but they were still craning their necks like curious black herons.  The hand not gripping her control stick curled into a protective fist and began to knead her kneecap in short, jerky strokes.  All around her, the heart of Hogwarts pulsed in frantic rhythm, and she shrank from it, shoulders rounding in a defensive hunch and shielding her exposed neck.

     _Stop it.  You're jumping at shadows, _her grandfather chided, irritation thickening his Irish lilt.

     _No, I'm not, and you know it._

_     No,_ he conceded, _you're not, but you don't even know what you're up against, and you're quailing like a spineless Frenchman.  You'll be of no use to anyone if you fall apart._

_     I don't want to be of use._

_     So that's it, then?  You're just going to leave him to whatever fate awaits, leave him to be torn apart by the wolves and the carrion crows until there's naught left but crumbling bones and faded, curdled memory?  His name will be reviled, and they will curse him, spit his name like the foulest obscenity.  No one will mourn him.  No one will know or care about what was lost._

     She thought of his eyes, bright and incisive as a scalpel, yet concealing as velvet.  In those brief, flitting moments when the curtain of secrecy parted, she saw a wounded dignity, a painful, lacerated hope that squeezed her heart inside her chest with its familiarity.  For a single breath, the shuttered windows set inside his pale face were mirrors that reflected true.

     _If you refuse, he will die, and what you see will never leave you.  It will haunt you, crush you beneath its eternal, oppressive weight the same way the Muscular Dystrophy smothered Deidre Clapham, extinguished her struggling, rattling breath like a guttering candle flame._

_     He's probably dead already._

_     Last I checked, probably wasn't definitely.  And even if he is, then you owe it to him to see that he isn't forgotten.  You yell the truth until someone hears you, until they pay attention.  You scream and you kick and you beat those stubborn fists of yours on every door within reach until one of them opens.  You hear me?  You pay what you owe._

_     I owe him nothing, _she countered, but even as the thought came to her, she denied it.  She _did_ owe him.  He had inadvertently pulverized her secure, anesthetizing shell into powder between his graceful, beautiful, cruel fingers, decimated it with a single, unguarded look.  He had made her feel, reawakened emotions she had long ago foresworn as dangerous snares-empathy, sorrow, and timid, starving hope.  Without him, she never would have reached beyond her vigilantly cloistered borders to befriend Neville, never would have lapsed into vulnerability long enough to accept his proffered companionship.

     She never would have learned to write.

     The grueling practice intended to break her spirit, to punish her for the unmitigated bravado to exist, was what decided her.  She had understood the esoteric code of letters long before most.  At three, she had been reading books designed for those twice her age.  By ten, she was fluent in the folksy rhythm of King, the rustic staccato of Hemingway, and the ebullient burble of Eyre.  She hadn't always grasped the subtle accompaniment beneath the words, the lofty themes or precepts, but she had possessed the keys to the kingdom, and as her mind grew, so had her knowledge.  But until Professor Snape, no one had thought her capable of weaving their magic by her own hand.  They had never offered her the choice.

     Once the Powers That Be determined that the act of forming letters and words was difficult and time-consuming, she was not permitted either pencil or quill.  Each time she reached for them, her hand was shunted aside, deflected to the more convenient Dicta-Quill.  Over time, she had come to accept the prohibition, and her awkward, clumsy hands no longer sought their light heft against her palm.  The natural conduit of thought from mind to hand to parchment had been severed and left to wither.

     Then Professor Snape, with his damnable temper and his callous dismissal of the illusion of fairness, had forced her to conform to his demands, to his world, and her neglected fingers found themselves rubbed raw with gripping and fumbling of the smooth, waxy shaft of a quill.  For the first time in their long association with her ramshackle body, they had been compelled to contribute to the weaving and dissemination of her knowledge.  They ached and throbbed with the effort, and sometimes they collapsed beneath the weight of their obligation, but despite the doomsaying of her childhood occupational therapists, they had achieved the impossible.

     Hers was not a pretty script, and it never would be.  It was wavering and spidery, and more often than not, it slanted to the right, but it was legible.  Professor Snape still scowled and snorted and deducted points whenever he received her homework, but amid the acerbic barbs about her atrocious penmanship and the contemptuous red slashes of his quill, he had begun to leave comments on the actual content of her work.  Terse concessions when the answers were correct and scathing derision when they failed to meet expectations.  She was inexplicably proud of them, the small tokens of his acknowledgement of her intellect, and unlike her classmates, she kept all her returned assignments.

     Truthfully, she had hated him for his cold insistence that she write, and on the nights when fatigue sank its hot, piercing tines into her wrist and cramped her agonized fingers, and she still had six inches of parchments to fill, she still did.  She despised him with the bright, ravenous hatred of the unjustly persecuted and wished a thousand painful, indecent hexes upon his tyrannical head.  But when the work was done, and the last _t_ crossed, the anger vanished, replaced by a sense of accomplishment and deeply rooted satisfaction.  In those moments, she almost loved him.  He, the miserable, despotic bastard who measured everyone by the same immutable standard had done something none of the well-meaning doctors, therapists, and wardens ever had.  He had judged her worthy of the opportunity to pass or fail as she would with no safety net to catch her should she stumble, no crutch upon which to lean.  Just like everyone else.

     She laughed, a strangled, unsteady sound amid the shuffling scrape of advancing feet, and Seamus tore his gaze from whatever awaited them and eyed her thoughtfully.

     "You all right?"

     She opened her mouth to tell him that she was, but instead, she heard herself say, "No.  But I will be."  Startled by her own candor, she tittered and clapped a hand over her mouth.

     Seamus peered at her face.  "You look terrible," he said, and one of his hands rested on her shoulder.

     The sudden warmth surprised her, and she bit her lip against another outburst of unseemly tittering.  There was nothing suggestive in the weight of his hand, no insinuation of attraction, but the touch was so intimate that it sent a slowly spreading warmth into the pit of her stomach.  She was afraid to move, lest he think her offended.  She counted the seconds his hand remained there, amazed when he did not retreat in unconscious revulsion.

     "You know how to make a girl feel pretty," she quipped, hiding her gleeful bewilderment behind the dependable shield of sarcasm.

"Er, well, that is, it's not that.  It's just that…"  The hand on her shoulder came up to rub at the rapidly reddening nape of his neck, and she felt a prickle of disappointment.  "You look sick," he blurted out at last, and his voice carried over the crowd, prompting several nearby faces to turn in their direction.

     "Really?  How very astute of you," she shot back, careful to keep her voice cool and disapproving.

     "Oh, bugger," Seamus moaned, throwing up his hands, and the desperate exasperation on his face crumbled her façade of offended indignation.  She cackled and swatted him on the arm.

     "I'm kidding," she snorted.  "I know what you meant.  I didn't sleep well last night.  No big deal.  I get that way when things…aren't right."  _Aren't right _was woefully inadequate to describe what was happening here, but _fucked up beyond belief and teetering on the brink of chaos_, true as it was, smacked of McGonagall-esque histrionics, and saying such a thing aloud would earn her more than her share of odd looks.

     From the grim, wary look on his face, she needn't have worried.  His gaze had returned to the task of vying for a glimpse over the heads of those in front of them, and after a few moments of futile craning and squinting, his jaw stiffened.  Beside her, George whistled.

     "What is it?" she asked through a throat that suddenly felt much smaller and drier than it should.

     "I don't know," George answered.  "It looks like some woman is checking wands."

     _This is it.   Grandpa, what do I do?_

_     What you've always done.  Watch and wait and hold the course until it's run.  No matter what, see it through._

     The surge of adrenaline coursing through her veins dizzied her, and she closed her eyes and adjusted her position in the chair with trembling arms.  Now that her path had been settled upon, she was caught between relief and terror.  She didn't know what to do, or how to begin, or where this dark and wending path would lead.  She suspected obstacles, some of them well-nigh insurmountable, but if she backed away, neither her grandfather nor her conscience would grant her any peace.  She reached into her pocket and pulled out her wand.

     _What am I going to see?_

     One thing was certain.  If she rolled into the Great Hall and saw Professor Snape lying on a bier before the High Table, or worse still, slumped and dribbling in a chair, she was going to turn tail and run.  She would not remember him as a lifeless, breathing husk, would not look upon him drained of his vigor.  She would flee, and it didn't matter who saw her or what they thought.  

     As her group drew closer, she saw the woman at the door, and her lip curled in instinctive mistrust and dislike.  She was short and squat, with pale, drooping jowls and thin lips that looked as though two strips of anemic liver had been stitched over her teeth.  One stubby-fingered hand gripped a clipboard; the other fisted around her wand.  At present, she was questioning a trembling first-year.  

     Rebecca recoiled, the taste of ash rising in her mouth.  She had never seen the woman before, did not know her name, and had never spoken a word to her, and yet she disliked her.  The feeling was so strong that she slowed her advance, reluctant to get any closer.  The Ravenclaw Prefect stumbled into her again and swore.

     "Out of the way, you imbecile," he hissed, and swept around her with a self-important flourish of his robes.

     Rebecca did not hear him.  The whole of her attention was fixed on the woman.  The unaccountable disdain washed over her again in a nauseating tide.  _I don't like her, not one bit.  _Her teeth began to grind, a muffled scrape, like die in a burlap bag.  _Don't like her._  

     There was no reason she should feel such antipathy.  The woman was not rude or demanding to the students passing before her scrutinizing gaze.  Indeed, she was smiling sweetly and patting the younger ones on the head as if they were amusing pets.  A misguided and unknowingly demeaning gesture, perhaps, but not a menacing one by any measure.  Still, the feeling persisted.

     _Maybe it's because of why she is here, _her grandfather suggested.  _Guilt by association._

     Maybe, but she doubted it.  At D.A.I.M.S., the doctors in their white coats had come with their needles and their choking nostrums and their agonizing, impotent, experimental procedures, and she had resented them, but she had never hated them, never feared them.  Not like this.  They had never dried the spittle in her mouth and made her flesh pucker into hard pink knots of gooseflesh, as if it were trying to escape her. 

     _She is bad._  _I don't care how sweet she acts.  Something isn't right._

     George, who had heard the Ravenclaw Prefect, called after him, "Sod off, you bum-sniffing tosser," and forked his forefinger and second finger at his retreating back.

     The woman turned her head in their direction, and when she did, Rebecca knew that her first instinct was right.  The woman was still smiling, but the smile did not reach her eyes.  They were hard as rusted rivets, cold and ruthless as a shark's.  Below her piggish nose, the supercilious grin stretched wider, a shark opening its jaws. 

     _The sharks are circling.  They've come for the blood._  

     She wanted to laugh and scream at the same time, but she did neither, unwilling to draw unnecessary attention to herself.  If she was really going to help Professor Snape, it wouldn't do to stand out.  From this moment forward, she was a fieldmouse amongst foxes.  Nothing and no one was to be trusted.  Head down, eyes and ears open, all loyalties and sentimentality forgotten.  She was dancing to beat the devil, and there could be no missteps if she wanted even half a chance.

     _How ironic.  A cripple dancing for someone's life._

     She snorted.  The woman was coming toward her, and Rebecca forced her jaw to relax and her eyes to lose their focus.  She let a stringer of saliva dribble down her chin.  _Please, God.  Let it work._

"Is everything all right over here?" she asked, the deceptively sanguine smile never leaving her face.

     _She puts on her makeup with a garden trowel_, Rebecca mused to herself, and slowly shook her head with an exaggerated wobble.  "No, ma'am," she slurred.  "Just a misunderstanding."  She gave a lopsided, twitching grin.

     "Er, yes, I'm sure," the woman said, and her smile faltered.  "What is your name, dear?"  She looked at her clipboard.

     Rebecca frowned ponderously and let several seconds pass before she said, "Rebecca Stanhope."

     "What, dear?  I'm afraid I didn't catch that."  The woman leaned closer.

     "Rebecca Stanhope," she repeated, garbling the name even further.

     "One more time, child," she said, and beneath the benign falsetto, Rebecca heard the first traces of irritation.  The woman drew closer still, her heavily powdered jowl nearly grazing her lips.

     "Rebecca Stanhope!" she shouted, spittle flecking the woman's cheek, and the woman recoiled with a breathless huff.  The clipboard slipped from her pudgy fingers and clattered to the floor.

     "Thank you," the woman said, and bent down to pick up the clipboard.

     "You're welcome, ma'am," she said cheerfully.

     She allowed herself a brief, sardonic smile before the woman straightened.  She had seen what she needed to see.  Not much, but just enough.  The momentary flash of disgust on the battleaxe's face when her, Rebecca's, warm saliva had speckled her cheek had held more than just the natural repugnance of another's spit.  It had been a look of sincere, undisguised loathing, contempt mixed with fear of contamination.  Behind the woman's serene mask of middle-aged mediocrity lurked a reptilian face.

     The woman smoothed her hair with fluttering fingers as she scanned the parchment fastened to her clipboard.  "Yes, I see.  You're the American transfer?"  There was a definite coolness in her tone now.

     Rebecca nodded, and drool dripped onto her robes.

     The woman scowled.  "You've a bit of saliva on your chin."

     Rebecca feigned surprise.  "I do?"  She brought a splay-fingered hand to swipe ineffectually at her chin.  She made sure to coat each digit with spit.

     The woman grimaced.  "Your wand, please."  She held out her hand.

     "Yes, ma'am."  She gripped her wand between wet fingers and handed it over, her face a mask of gormless gaiety.

     The woman pinched Rebecca's wand between her thumb and forefinger, her expression one of scarcely controlled neutrality.  She touched its tip with the end of her own and muttered, _"Consequi Semper scholasticus!"_

_     A Tracking Charm,_ Rebecca thought, and resisted the urge to narrow her eyes._  Have to get rid of that._  

     "There you are, dear," the woman cooed, and thrust her wand at her.

     "Thank you, ma'am."  She took the proffered wand and offered a syrupy smile in return.  She blinked, as if she were formulating her next thought.  "May I go in now?"  She jabbed a bony finger at the Great Hall, narrowly missing the woman's beefy upper arm.  She was not surprised to see her flinch.

     "Of course."

     Rebecca inclined her head and rolled toward the opened door, exhaling silently through her nose.  Behind her, the twins, Neville, and Seamus were undergoing the same interrogation.  No doubt they were wondering what in the hell had come over her.  The twins would probably suggest she visit Madam Pomfrey.  Seamus had been watching her from the corner of his eye, and when she had held out her spittle-caked wand, his jaw had unhinged with a brittle creak.  She braced herself for the barrage of questions to come.

     She was going to have to be careful that her friends didn't trip her up.  They knew better, and if she kept up the pretense of soft-headed fecklessness for long, they were going to demand answers, and not in the most opportune of times or places, most likely.  She supposed they would believe her if she told them she was only having fun, but that explanation would wear thin quickly.  Even the twins let go of a joke after a week or two, and this could take months.  Years.

     _I'll think of something._

_     You'd better.  There will be hell to pay if she catches on.  She'll never let you out of her sight, and she'll never believe a word you say, even if the proof of it is right in front of her.  She won't believe it just to spite you._

_     I could just tell them the truth._

_     Not until you have to.  It's too dangerous.  Word might get out, especially among your Housemates, and while Fred and George and that lot might be trustworthy, I wouldn't trust those twits Lavender and Parvati with my dirty skivvies.  Not to mention do-gooding Granger.  She stands for Truth, Justice, and Meddling in the Name of the Common Good.  If she decides you're being led astray by misguided impulses or the diabolical mind control of your Potions Master, nothing short of murder will keep her from turning you in.  For your own good, naturally._

     Naturally.  Since their row over House Elf rights, Hermione had been civil but cool, and each time she saw Winky bustling about the girls' dormitory, she favored her with a long-suffering, sympathetic glance that made Rebecca's hands itch to slap her.  They had never discussed the matter again, but from time to time, she felt the weight of Hermione's stare on the back of her neck while she toiled over her Potions homework, an inquisitive, measuring pressure that made the downy hairs on her nape prickle to attention.  

     _Tight-kneed prig would turn me in and call it divine retribution,_ she thought savagely, and rolled into the Great Hall.

     Had she been on her feet, she would have reeled, but she could only sag into her chair and bring her hands to her mouth in a dreamy, dazed gesture of astonishment.  This was beyond any wild imagining and infinitely more terrible.  She closed her eyes and tried to banish it, but when she opened them, everything was as it had been, and a hollow sigh escaped her.

     Aurors lined the walls.  They cut imposing figures in their impeccable blue robes as they stood with their hands clasped behind their backs and their feet touching, soldiers standing at attention.  Their faces were unmoving as wax, but their eyes were bright, alive, and searching.  They watched the students filtering to their respective tables with studied apathy, but Rebecca noted with miserable acuity that most of them followed the path of the Slytherins as they trudged to their places without a word.

     Much as she hated him, she couldn't help but feel a stab of admiration for Draco Malfoy.  He walked at the head of the Slytherin line, his head held high and his haughty, knowing smirk on proud display.  His languid, unhurried stride never faltered, never slowed, and his grey eyes never dropped.  He behaved as though nothing whatsoever were amiss.  He was a vicious, petty bastard, and nothing would erase that certainty from her bones, but he was also stubborn, and he would be damned if he would permit these lowly, grotty Aurors to change one iota of the life to which he had grown accustomed.

     "Blimey," Fred murmured as he came up, and he gazed around the room in pensive disbelief.  "There must be sixty of them."

     "Jesus," she moaned.

     The magnitude of the task set before her was now clear, and if it had been possible for her to fade into the simple black fabric and cool metal of her wheelchair, she would have done so without a whimper.  Sixty members of Magical Law Enforcement, and she had to fool them all.  It was a joke, a blatant impossibility.  Surely _one_ of them would be smart enough to see through her ruse, and one was all it would take.

     _I wouldn't count on it.  Most people believe what they see and don't bother to look any further.  You are only what meets the eye._

_     Yes, but most people don't have a reason to look below the surface, and they sure as hell do.  They'll peel away the layers of my life one by one.  I can't fool them all.  Sooner or later, either through carelessness or weariness, I'm going to slip.  _A tight knot of apprehension formed in her chest, and her hands began to tingle.  Her head felt as though she had just taken a whiff of nitrous oxide, and the world began to swim.

     _STOP IT!_ her grandfather roared inside her head, and the world returned to focus with an unceremonious jolt.  _You're putting the cart before the blasted horse.  Everything and every journey is only a series of interconnected steps.  Just take it one step at a time._

_     What if I make a mistake?  A man's life is at stake._

_     You can't worry about that, or you _will._  Just wait, and if you do bugger it, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it._

_     James Bond I'm not, _she thought, and from the depths of her muddled brain came the tinny, faraway strains of the James Bond theme.  She would have laughed had not the realization that it was precisely what events demanded she become settled on her shoulders like a wet and rotten mantle.

     She rolled to her space at the Gryffindor table and concentrated on her empty plate, fisted hands settled on either side of it like twin retaining walls.  If she looked at the Aurors, she was going to crumble, bury her face in her hands and gibber until soothing hands led her to the antiseptic sanctuary of St. Mungo's.  She could feel her heartbeat in her temples, a low vibrato pulse the made the flesh there jump imperceptibly.

     "Rebecca, what was that all about?"  Seamus seated himself across from her, an uncertain smile on his face.

     "What was what about?" she asked.

     "Out there with Madam Toad."  He jerked his head in the direction of the woman.

     "Is that her name?"

     "No," he sniggered, "but that's who she reminds me of, Mr. Toad, from _The Wind in the Willows._"

     "You read that book?"

     "My mam read it to me when I was little.  My dad insisted.  One of his childhood favorites or something sentimental like that."  His shoulders rose in a dismissive shrug.  "Anyway, what was all that about?"

     "Oh, just having some fun."

     "And splendid fun it was," Fred crowed, and clapped her on the back.  He sat beside her with a jovial smile.  "Quite the show.  Did you see her face when you handed her the spittle-caked wand.  Really first rate."

     She nodded, but made no answer.  She wished he would keep his voice down.  Madam Toad was still stationed outside the entrance to the Great Hall, armed with wand and clipboard and her disarming, shark-tooth smile, but there were sixty pairs of ears that would find the fact that a student was misleading them most interesting.  They might wonder what else she was hiding, and they might begin to dig, and she could not allow that.  Her thoughts and her sins were her own, and none but God would see them until she chose it.

     "Smashing rib, Rebecca."  George slid onto the bench beside his brother.

     She gritted her teeth, and the hard, white crescents of her nails bit into the flesh of her palms.  Her only defense and only hope would collapse before sunset if this continued.  "My ribs are perfectly fine, thank you.  I rolled out of bed," she said pleasantly, and prayed he would grasp the hint.

     His effervescent smile dimmed.  "What?"

     "Thanks for asking."  She smiled.

     His own smile evaporated, and he was regarding her in a sober, thoughtful manner.  He opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again.  His fingers drummed a nervous, jittering staccato on the tabletop.  Beneath the heavy wool of his winter robes, his chest rose as though here were drawing a deep breath.  His mouth opened again, but nothing emerged.  Whatever he wanted to say was lodged in his throat, sticky and bitter as infectious phlegm.

     She waited.  _He thinks I've cracked.  I can see it in the deliberate set of his face, that schooled blankness.  He's choosing his words carefully, oh, you bet.  Wouldn't want to set off the madwoman.  When he gathers the courage, he's going to ask if I'm all right and if there is anything on my mind.  And there is.  Too much, maybe.  But I can't tell him.  Not a single shred of it.  _

The seconds spun into a full minute, and Fred and Seamus shifted uneasily, their eyes darting to and fro between them, watching the silent chess match.  Neville, who had been detained longer than the rest, trotted up and stopped short, the heel of one foot hovering over the floor, cheerful salutation forgotten.

     "Yes, George?" she prompted.  She was still smiling, but it was frozen and pitifully fragile.

     George scratched his cheek and drummed on the table.  "Is everything all right?"

     She stared at the bridge of his nose, and the rigid smile widened.  Cracks formed in the taut flesh of her cheeks, and if she had to hold it much longer, the grin would become a scream.  "Of course.  Why wouldn't it be?"  Her eyes burned with the treacherous desire to turn in the direction of the Aurors, but she willed them to remain focused on the lightly freckled slope of his nose.

     "Well, you seem a bit out of sorts," he murmured.

     _God bless Weasley diplomacy._  "Can't imagine why," she muttered blandly.  The tortured smile fled.

     "Yes, well," he said, and his gaze turned to the cordon of blue-robed bodies surrounding them like the bars of a Dalian existential prison.  "I'm sure we'll find out what this is about soon enough."

     _Nothing existential about it; this is a prison.  That's what they're here for.  Every right you ever thought you had no longer applies, no longer has meaning.  You're under the rule of law now, and there is no more time for decency or fairness.  The civilized veneer is gone, and you're going to see what lies beneath.  You've always known, or at least suspected.  Time in a death room has a way of stripping things to the brass tacks.  For some of them, though, this is going to be a rude awakening._

The tickle of suppressed laughter teased her throat.  Wouldn't the young, idealistic Gryffindors be surprised the first time the new masters of the estate ordered them to stand aside while a rough-handed investigator searched their belongings, tossing crumpled parchments and treasured heirlooms to the floor with equal indifference?  And wouldn't they sputter with goggle-eyed, victimized outrage to know that every syllable of every word they committed to paper was being scrutinized to be sure no cryptic messages or warnings were being smuggled to the outside world?  Until the Aurors left, Hogwarts would exist as its own alien world.  The illusion of the democratic republic would be shattered.

     The doors to the Great Hall closed with an echoing, majestic boom.  The cell door slamming shut and sealing behind them.  The sound of shoe heels clacking on stone reverberated in the air, and the students turned to watch.  The Aurors remained impassive, stony gazes locked onto something only they could see.  Someone at the High Table sneezed.  A chair scraped.  A thousand pairs of eyes followed Madam Toad's progress.

     When she stepped behind the High Table, there was a collective intake of breath, a harsh, sussurating sigh.  Then absolute silence.  Rebecca's chest ached with the need to breathe, but she didn't dare.  Her nails sank further into her palms, and she was dimly aware of the burning sting of broken skin and the smoky, slick warmth of blood.  The knuckle of her thumb popped with a sound like a snapping twig, and on the periphery of her vision, she saw Neville jump.     

     Madam Toad's hand reached for Professor Snape's chair, and blood pulsed behind Rebecca's incredulous eyes.  She couldn't sit in _that_ chair; no one should, but her least of all.  It was sacrilege, the defacing of a memorial to a soul lost.  If her ponderous buttocks touched Professor Snape's seat, it meant that he was truly gone, that the slow, inexorable process of forgetting had already begun.

     She bit her tongue and hissed behind her teeth, the threat of tears gathering in her eyes like thunderheads.  Across from her, Seamus' eyes were huge in his pinched face, and the barest tip of his tongue darted out to moisten dry lips.  Neville was watching as well, and though his face mirrored the burgeoning horror in Seamus' face, there was also a tremulous hope, a glimmer of dreams within reach.  He saw his liberation from Professor Snape's tyranny, and he hungered for it.  Rebecca hated him for it.

     Just as Madam Toad was about to lower herself into the chair, the Headmaster cupped her elbow and whispered something in her ear.  The smug smile curled beneath her nose like a contented Cheshire cat faded, replaced by an offended, tight-lipped scowl.  She gave a brusque nod, straightened, and stalked to the far end of the table, where she sat in an empty chair with a theatrical huff.  Rebecca smiled at the Headmaster's beatific serenity, and she allowed her shoulders to drop.  He was still in charge.  There was a beacon in the storm.

     Someone from the Slytherin Table laughed, a shrill, hyena falsetto, a laugh of undeniable relief.  The tension ebbed, a palpable release of taut muscles and universally bated breath.  Rebecca reached up and kneaded the nape of her neck, hard as granite beneath her probing fingers.  The simmering, throttling grip of a monstrous headache lurked beneath the flesh of her cheeks and behind her eyes, caressing with warm, insistent fingers, but not yet squeezing, not yet crushing.  That was for later.  For now the danger had passed.  The sight of the Headmaster presiding calmly over the silent High Table kept the clawing pain at bay.

     "Blast the suspense.  Where's my breakfast?" Seamus muttered, and eyed his empty plate expectantly.

     "Well said, Mr. Finnegan," Dumbledore called, and the Great Hall erupted in giddy laughter.  When it tapered to watery snorts, he continued.  "I assure you, breakfast is forthcoming, but regrettably, I have a few announcements to make."

     At the mention of announcements, the pall returned, leeching the fledgling merriment from their bones.  The Slytherins, who had allowed themselves to smile, froze in the act of shifting in their seats.  Goyle's beefy hand wrapped around the edge of the bench in a white-knuckled grip, and Draco, heretofore a paragon of unruffled aplomb, arched one delicate platinum eyebrow in unspoken query.

     "As you have no doubt noticed, we have more than a few visitors."  He gestured at the Aurors with one long-fingered hand.  "They are here to investigate the incident involving Harry Potter.  While there is no evidence to suggest anything more than a lamentable accident, as Headmaster, it is my duty to ensure the safety of my students."

     "Then why hire that greasy Slytherin git in the first place?" Ron Weasley muttered savagely, eyeing Professor's Snape's empty chair with a mixture of loathing and mutinous glee.  

     "Each student will be questioned, and I expect the questioning will last for several weeks.  I realize that this disruption may prove inconvenient and distracting, particularly for those of you in the fifth and seventh years, but I must ask that you cooperate fully.  If you have any concerns, information, or questions, please ask your professors, an Auror, or Miss Umbridge."  He gestured to Madam Toad.

     _A name to the face at last,_ Rebecca thought.

     "As fifth-year Slytherins and Gryffindors were eyewitnesses to the events under investigation, they will be questioned first.  Please report to your Common Rooms immediately after your final lesson.  Should you miss dinner, the Great Hall will remain open until eight o'clock.  If there is nothing further, then I heartily second Mr. Finnegan's suggestion that we tuck in!"  He beamed at them.

     Umbridge hemmed and hawed, one hand raised in a mute call for recognition.  Dumbledore blithely ignored her.  "No?  Excellent."  He clapped his hands once, and the plates and tables groaned beneath the sudden weight of steaming food.

     Fred filled a bowl with steaming porridge and set it in front of her.  She grunted thanks and reached for the raisins, but he caught her hand.

     "You're bleeding."  He frowned at the speckling of blood on the table and turned her hand palm up.  He winced at the bruised crescent gouges left by her fingernails.

     "Bloody hell.  Does it hurt?"

     She shrugged.  Aside from the momentary sting of breaking skin, she had felt nothing.

     He turned over her other hand, and the frown deepened.  "Blimey.  Hermione!"

     "No, it's fine," she protested, trying to pull her hands away.  "They're only scrapes."  Help from Hermione was the last thing she wanted to accept.

     It was no use.  George held on, stubborn as a limpet, and before she could close her fingers over the scored flesh, Hermione was peering at it was a detached, clinical expression.  

     "Bit ugly, that," she said, one hand fisted loosely on her hip and the other holding her wand.  "What happened?"

     _Having a hard time eating in the middle of a lynch mob.  Not that it's any of your business.  _The treacherous thought coated her tongue like a mouthful of balsamic vinegar, but she swallowed it and said, "Spasm."

     "Mmm," Hermione grunted noncommittally.  "Well, however it happened, I suppose we'd better fix it."  Rebecca smirked at her politic skepticism.  How very Gryffindor.  How very irritating.  "Hold out your hands, palms up," Hermione ordered.

     She balked, but George favored her with an impatient, worried glower.  _I'll start a parade on the way to the Hospital Wing_, that look said, and she knew he meant it.  Best not to arouse suspicion.  A few of the Aurors were looking at them, their faces tilted imperceptibly toward the Gryffindor table.  She sighed and held out her hands.

     "Lay them flat," Hermione said.

     "This is as flat as they get."  

     Her mouth curled in a wry lilt at Hermione's surprised dismay.  She should have known better.  They shared a dormitory, and Hermione had seen Winky dressing her every morning.  She could not have missed the misaligned joints, the slightly skewed fit of her bones.  They jutted sharply from beneath the translucent skin in which they were clothed.  It should have stood to reason that the joints above her waist would be no different.

     "Oh," Hermione said.  Then she recovered herself.  "That will have to do, then," she said briskly.

     _I shudder at your magnanimity,_ Rebecca mused dourly.

     Hermione cleared her throat and raised her wand.  _"Scourgify!"_

     Soap suds appeared on her hands, and she grimaced as the astringent detergent seeped into her cuts.  She reflexively snapped her fingers closed in a vain attempt to shield them.

     "Oh, open up," Hermione said crossly.

     Rebecca ignored her, and only the vision of scrawled lines on parchment, the embodiment of the impossible, kept her from rolling over her toes.  She would be of no help to Professor Snape whiling away valuable time in detention.

     "Oh, have it your way," Hermione muttered.  "Honestly, stubborn as a mule."

     "Thank you."

     "It wasn't meant as a compliment."

     "No."

     "_Finite incantatem._"  The suds vanished.  She muttered a Healing Charm, and Rebecca watched as the ragged skin knit itself closed, sand shifting to cover a void.

     When it was done, and the skin of her palm was unmarked, she looked up.  "Thank you," she said stiffly.

     "You're welcome.  See to the table before you leave."  Then Hermione turned on her heel and went back to her spot on the bench.

     _There's a McGonagall-in-training for you, _Rebecca thought uncharitably.  _Professor Snape has a warmer bedside manner._

     At the thought of her absent professor, her eyes drifted to the empty chair, and her heart gave a painful wrench.  Her scant appetite faded altogether.  She prodded at her cooling porridge, stirring it lazily until it hardened to the consistency of concrete.  After that, she gave it unenthusiastic pokes with the edge of her spoon, carving abstract lines that reminded her of serpents.

     George nudged her.  "Something wrong with the porridge?"

     "No.  I'm not hungry."

     "You should be.  You barely touched your food last night."  He was looking her up and down with a critical, maternal eye.

     The black, noxious tide of her anger threatened to sweep away her veneer of civility, and she counted to ten before she spoke.  "I'm fine.  It's just stress."

     "Maybe you should see-,"

     "Madam Pomfrey, I know," she snarled, the anorexic thread of her fraying patience snapping like a bowstring stretched beyond its means.  "I can't tell you how glad I am to have my mother here with me."

     The moment the retort left her mouth, she regretted it.  She flushed a deep, ugly scarlet and studied her congealed porridge.  She picked up her spoon and jabbed it into the gruel.  She was acutely aware of his eyes on her burning cheek, and she fought not to squirm.

     "All right, then.  I'll not trouble you again."  Hurt, anger, and wounded pride.

     She wished for God to strike her down.  "I'm sorry, George," she said miserably, "that was bitchy of me.  I wish-," _I wish I may, I wish I might _"-wish I hadn't said that."  When there was no response, she said, "If I still feel wretched in the morning, you can take me to Madam Pomfrey yourself."

     "Fair enough," he agreed, and though he smiled, she knew all was not forgiven.  Her brutal rebuff of his solicitous kindness had cut him to the quick.

     _Twenty-five minutes beneath the cloak and dagger, and I'm losing my grip._

     She left as soon as she was sure it would not bring more questions, and the instant she was out of sight, she turned the speed dial to maximum.  She no longer cared about the castle or the priceless relics in it.  She wanted to feel the wind on her face and in her hair, to breathe air untainted by suspicion or hate, air beyond the reach of the Ministry's iron fist.  She pushed the stick forward as far as it would go.

     The walls blurred as she shot by, the whirring of her chair's wheels a terrified whine in her ears.  She pushed harder on the control stick, willing more speed from gears that had no more to give.  She cursed them, a breathless, furious hiss torn from her lips and cast behind her like malediction.  "Dammit, goddammit!"  One more inch.  One second faster.  That was all she would need to escape the bonds of her obligation.

     But there was no more space or time to be had, and the specter of that which her resurrected conscience demanded of her pursued her through the winding corridors, rattling its chains and wailing in disconsolate supplication.  No way to go but forward, and no way to see what awaited her.

     _I'm blind now, Judith.  Are you happy?_

By the time she reached the Care of Magical Creatures paddock, adrenaline surged through her veins, sharp and acrid as an electrical charge.  Her limbs were leaden with it.  The metallic tasted of it permeated her mouth.  She jerked to a halt, wrapped her shivering arms around her knees, and buried her face in the sagging valley of her lap.  She retreated into the dark, into the smell of wool and laundry soap and waited for her turbulent emotions to settle.

     "Mornin', Rebecca."

     Her head snapped up to find Hagrid looming over her, a jolly grin on his enormous face.  "Oh, hello, Hagrid," she said weakly.

     "You all right?"  His bushy eyebrows furrowed in concern.

     She looked into his open, guileless face and was seized with the urge to tell him everything, to go into his cottage and drink tea from a cup the circumference of her head and unburden herself.  He would listen.  He might not believe her, but he would do that much.  

     It was a tempting vision, but one that was not to be.  She adored Hagrid, but he was a notorious gossip, and it wasn't safe.  Not to mention he was an acolyte of Saint Potter.  He thought the boy was goodness incarnate, and not a day went by when he didn't visit him as he lay in the Hospital Wing.  

    "Oh, I'm fine," she said gaily, and then she burst into tears.

     _No help.  No help at all._     


	32. Her Kingdom For a Lie

Chapter Thirty-Two

     Later that evening, Minerva McGonagall and the other professors sat in the Headmaster's office and told themselves that there was nothing extraordinary about this meeting, that it was no different than the thousands before it, but the uncomfortable tension in the air belied the carefully constructed façade.  That and the presence of Kingsley Shacklebolt, seated by the door and armed with a sleek purple Dicta-Quill.

     He was here on Fudge's orders, of course, the well-heeled Ministry eyes and ears.  Fudge had wanted to come himself, but Albus had insisted that, as much of what would be discussed tonight pertained wholly to the running of the school and not to the investigation of Severus, his presence would be more hindrance than help.  All bollocks, and Fudge well knew it, but, eager as he was to dispense late-coming judgment upon his rival's most vigorous reclamation project, he had not yet gathered enough temerity or support to challenge Albus, and the presence of Shacklebolt at the staff meeting was the compromise.

     It was also an undisputed pain in the arse.  One couldn't be expected to freely discuss the problems of their various charges with Ministry officials eavesdropping in the name of "security."  The fact that Maggie Weldon, one of her first-years, was still having an intermittent problem with bedwetting was no business of the Ministry's and certainly had nothing to do with national security.  

     _I wouldn't be so sure of that.  That boob, Fudge, is convinced Albus and the rest of us are secreted in this impregnable ivory tower and plotting the overthrow of Wizarding government.  No doubt Miss Weldon's sporadic bedwetting is a cleverly concocted scheme to poison unwanted intruders by slipping it into the water supply.  Never mind that the poor child's been wetting the bed since beginning of term.  That just means that Trelawney foresaw the calamitous happenings and subsequent invasion by heavy-handed officials, and we've taken pre-emptive measures.  Merlin in a garter._

     She shifted in her seat and pinched the bridge of her nose.  The entire day had been sheer madness.  Her lesson plan had been lost amid a sea of anxious questions, questions to which she had no answers.  Why?  How?  What?  Forthright and justified and terrifying.  Nothing in her life or the vast pool of her knowledge had prepared her for anything like this, not even the war against Grindewald.  

     Then, there had been an enemy to whom she could point in righteous surety, a dark and terrible bogey upon which she could lay blame.  _He was the reason homes were surveiled and people were detained indefinitely.  He was the reason innocent fathers were sundered from bewildered, weeping sons and wives.  His menace and pervading evil had necessitated these things.  And when his mutilated corpse was dragged through the cobbled street of Diagon Alley by a jubilant mob delirious with relief and renewed hope, all the misguided wrongs were righted with an official apology and a tidy sum from the Department of the Exchequer.  Life had gone on._

     But what did she tell them now?  What _could_ she tell them?  Where was the bloodthirsty, inhuman ghoul upon whom she could prop her infallible justification, the ominous villain who would serve as validation of these unwarranted upheavals?  Even if Severus _had tried to kill Harry-and he probably had, despite Albus' unspoken doubts-it couldn't possibly justify the wholesale trampling of their rights.  _

     For years, she and the other teachers had been prating about the rights of man and of common decency, of justice and nobility and purity of law.  They had been told ever since they were old enough to listen that if they believed in order, paid their taxes, and accepted the rule of law, the slavering, needle-toothed creature that protected them from the creeping evil outside their walls would never round on them.  A drop of blood to save a pint.  Justice was blind, she had told them, and despite all the evidence to the contrary she had seen, she had made herself believe it.  She had persuaded herself that the illegal seizures and incarcerations of Grindewald's time were an aberration.  Deep down, she had known better, and now, so did her students.

     _What happened to Hagrid should have removed all doubt as to the question of the law's blindness._

_     Her gaze shifted to where Hagrid sat, his enormous bulk stuffed into one of Albus' ornate chairs.  He was too big for it; the legs creaked and groaned beneath his weight, and in his moleskin coat, he reminded her of an overstuffed laundry bag.  He smiled when he saw her._

     "Evenin', Professor McGonagall," he boomed, and he brought his fingers up to touch the brim of a non-existent hat.

     "Good evening, Hagrid."  She tried to smile, but it soured into a grimace, and she gave it up.

     He shifted uneasily in his seat, his own smile faltering, and the chair emitted an alarming crack.  He flushed.  "Think I'm a tetch big for this chair," he muttered.

     Flitwick, seated to her left, pulled out his wand.  "_Engorgio!" _he squeaked absently, and the chair in which Hagrid sat doubled in size with a jubilant _pop_.

     Hagrid sprawled with a grateful sigh.  "Thank ye.  Much obliged, Professor."

     Flitwick stowed his wand and flapped his hand in nonchalant dismissal.  His normally serene, joyful face was subdued and pinched, as though he were plagued by too many thoughts.  McGonagall knew how he felt.  Her own skull throbbed in the throes of a monstrous headache whose hardy, tenacious seeds had been sown when a whey-faced third-year had raised her hand and asked, in a quavering, solemn whisper, if the Aurors would be using Unforgivables or other Curses during the course of their interrogation.  She hadn't known whether to swoon or curse, and though she had told the girl that no such thing would happen, she still felt ambushed and off-center.

     Much as she had tried to reassure her charges with a stern façade and noble platitudes, she was no longer certain of the ground beneath her feet.  She was too aware of politics and paranoia and the strange, perverse bedfellows they made.  Logic told her that the students had nothing to fear from the Ministry, that as vain and pompous and stupid as Fudge was, as ruthlessly protective of his power, he would never harm them, if for no other reason than it would alienate his voting constituents.  But she had a sinking feeling that logic had no place in this, that truth and justice and the punishment of sin were only empty avatars waved for the sake of appearances.  

     Severus deserved everything that was coming to him and more for his multitudinous unnamed sins, of which poisoning Harry was not the least, but the children of Hogwarts were suffering on his account, and that she could not abide.  If she could not protect them, then she had failed them as a teacher.  The memory of the third-year's bulging eyes and frightened moon face loomed in her mind's eye, and she pushed it away with a pained tut.

     _Wouldn't be the first time, would it?_  Peter Pettigrew's pudgy, sullen face replaced the third-year.  She tore off her spectacles and let them fall to her lap.  The sudden movement caused the relentless pain in her head to flare, and behind her closed eyelids, a blue sun supernovaed.  She pressed her cold fingertips to her aching temples and kneaded them with short, impatient strokes.

     "Minerva?"  Albus said, his voice little more than a whisper.  "Is something the matter?'

     "What isn't the matter, Albus?" she snapped incredulously, her eyes flying open.  "Aurors in the corridor!  Listening Charms in the Common Rooms!  Interrogations, for Merlin's sake!  What in the blazes do I tell my students?"

     Albus held up a placatory hand.  "They're only questioning the students.  Nothing more."

     Minerva wasn't soothed.  "Spare me the useless semantics.  I'm not a goggle-eyed first-year," she fumed.  "You know very well what is happening here.  This is insanity.  Fudge wanted to put Listening Charms in the dormitories.  As if the students were doing anything but snoring and snogging.  Rumors are already flying.  Half the school is convinced they're to be tortured.  How am I supposed to teach them anything with worries like that floating about their heads?"  She stopped, hands fisted in her lap, chest heaving.

     Albus made no reply.  He turned around, opened the decanter of brandy, poured three fingers into a tumbler, and handed it to her.

     "Perhaps you would like a drink?"  His tone was light, but his eyes were grave.

     She gaped at him in speechless surprise for an instant, then took the proffered glass.  "Yes, I think I would."  She hesitated, looked at the contents of the tumbler, and took a generous swallow.

     A voice from beside her.  "If you don't mind, Headmaster, I wonder if I might have a nip?"

     She nearly dropped her glass.  She had known Filius Flitwick for thirty-five years, and she had never seen him indulge in spirits, not even an obligatory sip to ring in the new year.  Indeed, his unwavering sobriety usually landed him the unenviable task of overseeing the end-of-term staff party-confiscating the wands of those too intoxicated to wield magic safely, placing Anti-Apparating Charms on the more exuberant revelers, and ascertaining that everyone had safely returned to their chambers once the evening had drawn to a close.  If he was breaking his long-held vow of abstention, then she was clearly not alone in her concerns.

     Albus smiled, but she could see a flicker of surprise in his eyes.  "Of course, Filius."  He reached for another tumbler.

     "I believe I'll partake as well, Headmaster."  That was Vector, hunched in his chair as if his stomach pained him, and maybe it did.  He'd battled a bleeding ulcer for years.

     "I can't imagine the alcohol will be good for your stomach, Faustus," she warned, taking another sip from the tumbler in her hand.

     "Maybe not," he grunted, "but right now I don't give a damn."  He looked at her, and she was shocked to see that black rings of exhaustion raccooned bleak, irritated eyes.

     "Anyone else?" Albus asked.

     In the end, everyone save Moody accepted a glass.  As was his wont, he slouched in his chair and nipped from his silver hip flask.  McGonagall felt an inexplicable surge of pity for Hagrid's glass, small and fragile in his clumsy, engulfing hand.

     _Ten to one it ends up pretty kaleidoscopic dust_, she mused, and a dry, mirthless chuff escaped her. 

     Albus poured himself a glass.  "Anything for you, Kingsley?"  His hand hovered over an empty tumbler.

     The Auror gave a listless grin and shook his head.  "Thank you, Headmaster, but I'm afraid that wouldn't be wise."

     "No, I suppose not," Albus murmured ruefully, and returned his hand to his desktop.  He pushed his spectacles onto the bridge of his nose and sipped his brandy.

     No one spoke.  They studied the rapidly disappearing brandy in their tumblers and waited for someone else to pick up the sword.  Vector grimaced and kneaded his stomach.  Sprout tugged compulsively on the hem of her robes, her eyes fastened on the square toes of her boots.  Hagrid raised his empty tumbler to his lips, trying to coax the last drops from the bottom.  

     "This is a fine mess, Albus," Moody growled.  His magical eye fixed on Dumbledore, and he took another pull from his flask.

     "A third-year Slytherin who lost her mother to the Aurors in a case of mistaken identity went to pieces in the morning lesson," Vector said dully.  "She stood up and told everyone that they were going to start with Snape and work their way down until there wasn't a Slytherin left.  'The Mudbloods were taking over.'  Then she burst into tears and retreated into a corner.  Took twenty minutes to coax her out.  One of her Housemates took her to the Hospital Wing."  He finished his brandy with a gulp and set the tumbler on the floor by his feet.  "Merlin in a chamberpot."

     Albus reached for his quill.  "What was her name?"

     Vector ran a hand through his graying brown hair.  "Sarah…Sarah Ogleby."

     Albus wrote it down.  "I'll see her in the morning."  He sounded drained.

     "You'll have problems with the lot of them," Moody warned.  He sat up and gripped his walking staff.  "That House brings naught but trouble.  They'll make trouble if they can, especially young Mr. Malfoy.  I'd keep an eye on him."

     McGonagall groaned.  Moody was right.  Malfoy would make trouble.  The pampered little miscreant was a master at creating discord and strife.  He had been baiting Harry since the beginning, and now Stanhope was a favorite target.  With his choice nemesis indisposed and his Head of House accused of the crime about which he himself had fantasized, there was no limit to the havoc he could wreak.  The sooner he was muzzled, the better.

     _Be thankful he isn't his father._

     There was that.  Draco Malfoy was an arrogant, snide, bullying prat with neither foresight nor discipline.  Lucius Malfoy had both in excess, and it made him dangerous.  She had watched him grow from a privileged, self-assured young man into an urbane, polished, savvy man of influence and prestige in the wizarding world.  If the son could foment temporary unrest with insouciant, juvenile rumors and impotent grandstanding, then the father could launch a sustained attack on the Headmaster and the school.

     The elder Malfoy might have been removed from his public role on the Board of Governors, but she would wager every Galleon, Sickle, and Knut she had ever earned and ever would that he was still very much involved in school politics thanks to his deep pockets and generous "charitable donations."  She wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that the very governors that had so publicly lambasted him for his craven and despicable threats against their families during the Chamber of Secrets fiasco were happily partaking of his lavish hospitality at Malfoy Manor.  In exchange for being kept abreast of the happenings at Hogwarts, naturally.

     He would get wind of this, if he hadn't already.  There wasn't a student in the school who hadn't sent a frantic owl to their parents with all the lurid details of the scandal.  The day after Harry's collapse, the skies over Hogwarts had been black with departing owls, and though it was likely Fudge would impose restrictions on the correspondence entering or leaving the castle, it was a foregone conclusion that the Slytherins and some of the more intrepid Ravenclaws had anticipated such bothersome bureaucracy and sent owls out before dawn.  Draco had probably led the charge, so sure that his father's wealth and influence would solve everything.

     _So far, he's been right._

     She sniffed.  The accursed Malfoy luck.  Anyone else accused of threatening the families of governors with Dark Curses would have been censured, barred from public office, and possibly sentenced to a term in Azkaban, but there had been no penalty for Lucius.  He was still welcome at the Ministry, still a regular visitor to Fudge's posh office.  The _Daily Prophet had published a meaningless drabble in the _News and Notices _section announcing that he had been fined an undisclosed sum.  That was all._

     _Undisclosed.  Fifty Galleons and dinner at Le Rouge Petit.  Fudge never met a meal not to his liking, and Lucius' generosity allows him to live well beyond his means.  Most inconvenient to have your benefactor in Azkaban._

     It was useless to hope he would ignore the situation.  The name Potter was both anathema and aphrodisiac to the clan Malfoy.  They could no more resist him than a moth could resist the deadly siren song of the candle flame.  As servants of the Dark Lord, they were bound by the noisome chains of twisted fealty to apprise themselves of the Boy Who Lived's every move, and the fact that he was currently not moving, was still as a corpse, in fact, would prove irresistible.  He would have to see it with his own eyes, and as the concerned parent of a Hogwarts pupil, he was well within his rights to enter the school.

     She shuddered at the thought.  Lucius could complicate things immeasurably.  He had long coveted the Headmaster position, but Albus' popularity and renown had thwarted his ambitions.  For a time during the Chamber of Secrets crisis, it appeared the prize was at last within his grasp.  Albus had been removed, and nervous parents had questioned her untested ability to lead.  Unsurprisingly, Lucius had graciously offered his services, citing his political experience and long-cultivated connections within the Ministry power structure.

     He had no doubt cut an impressive figure in his exquisite, tailored robes and spit-polished boots.  His flowing platinum locks and delicately sculpted features radiated dignity and ancient bloodlines, and his days as Voldemort's henchman were long forgotten.  Had it come to a vote, there would have been only one outcome; her salt-of-the-earth pragmatism and prim Scottish looks were no match for a well-bred, monied archangel with a serpent's tongue and an even blacker heart.  But then Ginny Weasley had been taken, a Pureblood, and in a panic, the governors had rescinded Albus' suspension.  Victory had been snatched from Lucius' eager grasp.

     He had neither forgiven nor forgotten.  Malfoys never forgot.  Grudges and hatreds that should have died with ancestors long forgotten lived on in their rarefied blood, potent as the day they were wrought.  They waited generations, sometimes centuries, for vengeance.  Three years had done nothing to dilute his seething, well-hidden rage, and since the catastrophic events following the Tri-Wizard Tournament, he had stepped up efforts to discredit his foe.  It had all been to little effect, but once the world got wind of Potter's collapse, Lucius' faltering campaign would gather renewed strength.

     _Indeed.  Imagine how things would go if people realized we were housing a suspected attempted murderer in the dungeons instead of Azkaban, where he rightfully belongs?_

_     She quashed a groan.  That would be the end of his tenure.  Even if Severus were later cleared, the simple fact that he allowed a man who _could _have committed such a monstrous deed to remain on the school grounds would be a lethal indictment against his judgment.  There were too many what-ifs, too many crawling shadows of unpleasant possibility.  The unsettling prospect of what might have been had cost Remus Lupin, the gentlest soul she had ever known, his job, and if the Headmaster continued on his present course, Albus would follow in his footsteps. _

     _The man has no sense when it comes to Severus.  He never has.  He refuses to see what the rest of us see, feel what the rest of us feel.  He's so bent on proving that that which was lost to the Darkness can be saved.  There is no truth save his truth, and by the time he realizes that Severus is the child of his master, it will be too late._

_     Maybe Lucius was right._

     She cursed herself for such a treacherous thought.  Albus Dumbledore might be a trifle dotty and far too trusting for his own good, but he was still the greatest wizard upon whom she had ever clapped eyes and the best Headmaster Hogwarts would ever know.  If the job ever came to her, she could only hope to carry the office with as much dignity and wisdom as he had.  She would dig her own grave with her bare hands before she would see Lucius Malfoy in that chair. 

     _Stop dithering about Malfoy and focus on a problem that you can solve, _she chided herself, and squared her shoulders in unconscious resolution.

     Albus tilted his half-empty tumbler in an indolent circle, his eyes fastened on the slowly swirling contents.  "Are there any other incidents about which I should know?" he asked.

     "Mebbe, Headmaster, sir."  Hagrid sat forward in his seat, his elbows propped on his mammoth knees and his hands dangling between them, the empty tumbler glistening between the fingers of the left.  "I had an incident with young Rebecca this mornin'."

     "An incident?" McGonagall repeated shrilly.  "What sort of incident?"  Visions of frothing fits danced in her muddled head like rancid sugarplums.

     "Don't alarm yerself, Professor," Hagrid soothed, empty hand coming to his chest in a conciliatory gesture.  "It wasn't nothin' dangerous.  It was jes'-," he paused, the empty hand traveling to the matted nest of his hair to scratch thoughtfully (should be thoughtfully) at an unseen nit, "odd."

     "What do you mean, 'odd'?" she demanded.

     "I've never heard a lass weep like that," he said.  "Loud, warblin' keenin' fit to rouse the dead.  Like summat inside her was dyin' or bein' torn out wi' hot pincers.  Didn't last but five minutes, then it was like nothin' happened.  Like she flipped a switch an' turned it off.  Seamus and the rest of the fifth-years started comin' from the castle, an' that was it.  'Cept for red eyes accourse."

     "Why didn't you tell me earlier?"  McGonagall's eyes blazed, and her lips were drawn in a tight, bloodless line.

     Hagrid stared at her, bushy eyebrows knitted in guileless consternation.  "What for?  She looked a bit peaky, but she wasn' sick.  I asked her if she wanted to go to see Pomfrey, but she said no, and by then, she was all right, more or less."

     "Still, you should have used more sense.  She needs careful handling," she snapped.

     An incredulous huff escaped Hagrid's enormous chest.  "Honestly, Professor, it was nobbut a spell of temperament-a bad one, for all that, but no more.  In all the years I've been 'ere, I've seen more cryin' girls than can be counted on a thousand hands, an' I've never sent 'em to the Hospital Wing."  He cast a beseeching glance at the Headmaster, who had watched the confrontation in silence, long fingers stroking the white down of his beard.

     She forced herself to take a deep breath and waited until the pounding tide of blood in her temples ebbed.  "You're right, Hagrid.  I'm sorry," she muttered.  "I know I'm being a beast.  I'm just worried about her.  About all of them."   

     "We all are, Minerva," Flitwick reassured her, and gave her hand a gentle pat.  "We all are."

     "You dear man," she murmured, and folded her trembling hands beneath her chin.  She was gripped by the absurd and utterly impractical desire to weep.

     _Look at you.  Falling apart in a crisis.  You did better the first time around._

     She had been fifty-five years younger then, and blessedly naïve.  It had never occurred to her, in the midst of tense strategizing and fierce, blood-soaked battles, that the fate of the wizarding world might rest on her shoulders.  She had been too wrapped up in the objective du jour to ponder what failure might mean.  It was only afterward, in the fever-dream months that followed Grindewald's defeat, that she had begun to understand. 

     While everyone else reveled in the newly liberated streets, she sat in her neglected flat, haunted by the stench of blood and charred earth, and grappled with the enormity of the changes she had helped to bring.  It was a piecemeal assimilation.  Had she been aware of what she was truly fighting for, and of the sacrifices that would be required to meet those ends, she would have lost her mind. 

     She had no such luxury anymore.  Whatever willful blindness she had managed to salvage from the smoldering wreckage of her youth had been torn from her during the Dark Lord's first reign of terror.  Even her formidable Scottish will could not sustain it in the face of the glazed, lifeless eyes of former pupils whose stiffening bodies she had left on scorched and blasted battlefields.  Their mangled, profaned corpses had dislodged the scales from her eyes and made her see the truth.  

     She was on her third voyage on this terrible carousel, and she prayed it would be her last.  She was too old for this, had seen too much.  They all had.  She and Albus and Alastor were privy to the unspeakable stakes of this wretched game, and she was no longer sure the old guard was up to the challenge.  Their minds were as astute as ever, but their steps were slower.  Bones and tendons groaned with the weight of age and cares.  The battles to come would be waged by the young; they would act as armchair generals and send their sons and daughters to die in their stead.

     "Have there been any further incidents?"  Dumbledore took another sip of brandy.

     When none were forthcoming, he folded his hands on his desk.  "Then that leaves us to decide how to handle the most pressing problem, namely who will take Severus' lessons until this matter is settled."

     There was an uneasy and vaguely shamed silence.  None of them were adept at Potions.  They had no need to be, what with a Potions Master on the premises.  They had all been busy with their own curriculums, and the thought that bright minds might one day depend on their outdated knowledge had never crossed their minds.  Truth be told, Madames Sprout and Pomfrey were the only ones required to familiarize themselves with current Potions, and only insofar as it pertained to their jobs.  They gaps in their knowledge were vast and crippling when it came to teaching O.W.L. and N.E.W.T.-level studies.

     "I can try," Professor Sprout offered uncertainly.  

     "Alas, Professor, though I admire your willingness to help, I'm afraid it won't do.  Your Herbology students need your expertise."

     "You're right, Headmaster," Sprout sighed, but McGonagall spotted the surreptitious, guilty relief in her eyes.

     "What can we do?  She and Severus are the only ones remotely qualified to teach the subject, and I doubt that fool, Fudge, is going to relent and let him teach," McGonagall said.

"Indeed not.  Severus would be more likely to receive an invitation to the Gryffindor Common Room."  Lurking beneath the levity of Dumbledore's words was a hint of the nerve-wracking strain that plagued them all.  He offered a wan smile.  "Have you forgotten, Minerva, that I have been known to dabble in Potions now and again?  My work with Nicholas Flamel necessitated it."

     An embarrassed flush bloomed in her cheeks.  She _had_ forgotten."Of course not.  I simply assumed you would be far too busy as Headmaster and liaison to the Ministry to consider taking on the position."

     "Perhaps so, but the pupils need an instructor, and I must confess that prospect of lecturing on a topic other than moribund rules and regulations that haven't changed in ten centuries is most appealing."

     "A week of marking parchments will set you to rights," Sinistra muttered drily, and appreciative laughter rippled through the room.

     "I have no doubt you are correct, Professor.  However, I see little alternative."

     "What you see aside, are you certain that's wise?" McGonagall interjected.  "Brilliant as you are, you're not as young as you once were.  It seems far too much for you to shoulder, Albus."

     Privately, she thought he looked unwell.  The flesh of his face was thin, pale, and drawn, delicate as crepe over his bones.  Exhaustion and concern smudged beneath his eyes like soot, as though the Fates had marked his thread for cutting.  She shivered at the thought.  They would be lost without his decisive hand, blind men groping for smoke and shadows, and the Ministry would waste no time in appointing a mindless puppet in his place.  If Cornelius Fudge were their leader in the war against Voldemort, then He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's victory was already assured.

     "Albus," she said, before professional decorum could override a wave of concern, "let someone else take his place.  If something should happen to you-"  She stopped abruptly, and her narrowed eyes darted to Shacklebolt.

     "If something should happen to me, the world will stand and wizardry as we know it will continue," he said matter-of-factly.  "As for the school, I am certain it would be left in more than capable hands."

     He smiled at her, saying in a simple, fleeting upturning of the lips what a thousand flowery words could never have expressed so succinctly, so eloquently.  She was overwhelmed with a flood of love for the man, so powerful it made her chest throb.  She couldn't imagine her life without him, and though she knew it was an impossible wish, she hoped she would never have to face it.

     _Bless you and damn you, you stubborn, foolish, beautiful man_, she thought fiercely.  "Yes, it will, Headmaster.  Or I'm not worthy of my House," she managed, and swallowed with an audible click.

     "Then I have no reason to fear," he said calmly.  His gaze shifted to Shacklebolt.  "Everything all right, Kingsley?"

     Shacklebolt uncrossed his legs and readjusted his robes.  "Quite, Headmaster.  I was simply admiring your exquisite portraits."  

     "They are magnificent," Dumbledore agreed.  "I find that one to be of particularly excellent quality."  He pointed to the gilded portrait of a dour, sallow, thin man with eyes hard and piercing as polished flint.  The picture drew its shoulders back and sneered at them.

     Shacklebolt leaned forward and peered at the polished pewter nameplate beneath the ornately gilded piece.  "_Phineas Nigellus, Headmaster of Hogwarts 1820-32, and Master of the Dark Arts and House Slytherin."  _He sat back with a low whistle.  "He was a pompous one, I'll wager."  The portrait snarled and flounced beyond the borders of the frame.

     "The only Slytherin Headmaster in Hogwarts' history, if I'm not mistaken."  Dumbledore adjusted his spectacles.  "Though I have hopes that we might one day see another."

    _If you mean Severus, Headmaster, I fear you're very much mistaken, _McGonagall thought.

     Sometimes she pitied Albus for his interminable, unconquerable optimism.  He hoped for the impossible and the unattainable and never regretted it, never questioned.  What confounded her more was the inexplicable and miraculous fact that the things for which he wished came to pass more often than not.  Unfortunately for him, his dream of Severus becoming Headmaster was not going to be one of them.  Even if some small chance had existed before-and it had not-the eternal stain of this blasphemous accusation had crushed it.

     _Deep in his heart, he knows the truth, but he has his dreams and his secret regrets, and who am I to trample them into dust and flaunt them?  Merlin knows I have more than my share of both when the lights go out._

_     She preferred not to think of _that_ just now.  That was for the darkness and the cold silence and the bottle of Glenfiddich stashed in her armoire, not the bright, warm Headmaster's office._

     _It'll come for you tonight, won't it?  It hasn't in a very long time.  You've managed to avoid it, but not tonight.  You'll sit on your sofa, drink your Glenfiddich, and see it all in your mind's eye.  That delicious fantasy that has haunted you for fifteen years.  It will be so close that you can feel it, taste it on your tongue like the honeyed aftertaste of a lolly.  And you'll damn yourself for the hundredth time for returning that Time Turner to the Ministry instead of using it to take back that awful, bloody night._

_     Don't be absurd.  There was nothing I could have done.  And even if there had been, there is no guarantee that the new present would be better than this one.  _

_     That's what you tell yourself now, bathed in the soothing light of rationality and professional necessity, but tonight, when that cherished professorial robe has been hung in the wardrobe, and you have that chilled tumbler clutched in one numb and shaking hand, rationality will lose its potency to the darkness that breeds hopeless fantasy.  You'll take a drink, and while the liquid burns a path to your stomach, you will close your eyes and wish for that Time Turner, wish for the chance to see what you missed the first time and make it right.  You'll wish for the chance to save them, to give Harry what you cost him, and you, a Gryffindor to the very marrow, will curse the law, and when you go to sleep, you'll dream of that tiny magical hourglass, the one you let slip through your fingers._

_     She shoved the thought away, furious that her demons had the temerity to find her here.  She cleared her throat.  "It's decided, then?" she asked more sharply than she had intended._

     "I should think so.  The students have already lost a day's lessons," Dumbledore answered.

     "That still leaves the issue of who will be interim Head of House," Sinistra pointed out.  

     "Under school bylaws, only one-," McGonagall, began, but Dumbledore silenced her with an uplifted hand.

     "Regardless of the bylaws, I would prefer that someone else accept the position.  I'm afraid the Slytherins will not accede to new leadership as readily as the other Houses."

     There was a derisive snort from Moody.

     McGonagall's lips thinned.  _Bollocks.  What you say is absolutely true, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with your decision._  "Albus, please.  You can cover it up however you like, but the truth is you can't stand to see anyone else wearing that pin."  She jabbed a finger at the silver serpent pin lying atop a stack of parchment.  "It's his own fault.  He should have to suffer the consequences."

     An incredulous, anguished silence blanketed the room.  Even Fawkes spared a moment from his preening.  Flitwick cleared his throat and examined the clasp of his cloak.  Sprout resumed her detailed study of the toes of her boots and muttered under her breath.  Moody unscrewed his flask and took a long draught.  Hagrid eyed it with an expression of covert longing.

     "Oh, stop it," she snapped.  "This has gone far enough.  Albus, I know you think there is a chance for Severus, but it isn't so.  He's as evil as the Lord he followed, and he's proven it time and again.  Not a shred of decency in him, not one.  We all sense it; even the students feel it.  You can't save him, Albus.  Surely you must know that?" she beseeched him, palms upturned in a mute plea for the return of reason.

     The Headmaster made no reply, but she knew she had scored a deep and painful hit.  His eyes had dimmed, and his hand had frozen in mid-stroke of his voluminous beard.

     _Merlin knows I never wanted to cause you hurt, but it has to be said.  Forgive me._  "Let the Aurors take him to Azkaban," she pleaded.  "They'll leave Hogwarts and its pupils in peace, and justice will be served in the end, whatever it may be."  There was a muffled grunt from Moody, and she scowled at him.

     "I cannot allow them to take an innocent man to Azkaban, Minerva," he said quietly.

     "You let them take Hagrid well enough," she retorted, and instantly regretted it when she caught a glimpse of the giant's wounded countenance.  _Fine way to make your case, by dragging innocent bystanders into the fray._

     "They weren't going to summarily throw Hagrid to the Dementors.  I doubt they could have thrown him anywhere he did not wish to go."

     "And they'll not throw Severus to them, either.  Not until they're certain one way or the other."

     "Wouldn't wager on that," Moody growled.  "Plenty of Aurors lost loved ones to his lot, and none of them would look askance at letting a Dementor 'slip' its tether for a few minutes."  He shifted in his seat and propped his walking stick between his knees.

     She stared at him, horrified.  "They wouldn't!"

     "Not everyone is a Gryffindor," was his only response.

     That put things in an entirely new perspective.  As eager as she was to see Severus get his overdue comeuppance, that was not the way to go about it.  He deserved the chance to offer up whatever feeble defense he could muster, an opportunity to make his peace with the Fates before all thought and emotion and vitality was wrenched from his mind by the putrid, hungry lips of a creature that never should have existed.

     _Why?  His victims never had that courtesy.  They died in their beds or begging on their knees.  Harry never knew what happened.  He merits no better._

_     Because if I stoop to that level, if I allow the Ministry _to sink so low, then I will be no better than those I despise.  The line dividing Light from Dark will cease to be, and the Dark Lord will have his victory, no matter what the battles and trials to come may say.  __

     "If there are no further grievances, let us move to other matters," Dumbledore said.  Discussion on the vacant Head of Houseship was clearly closed, and without resolution.

     "What about the students?  What should we tell them?  They're anxious and curious," Sinistra ventured.

     "Let them know that all teachers will be available to address any fears they may have.  I am scheduling a Hogsmeade outing for this Saturday.  A day in the sunshine without Aurors breathing down their necks will do them good.  As for their curiosity, I'm afraid that will go largely unsatisfied for the time being."  A rueful smile flickered on his face, and then he grew somber once more.  

     The rest of the meeting was spent in the discussion of supply reorders and unruly pupils, the anesthetizing minutiae of boarding school education.  She could almost forget that there was anything amiss, and more than once, she found herself wondering when Pomona Sprout was going to stop bemoaning the woeful mandrake seedling shortages or the need for more dragon-hide gloves.  But then her wandering eyes would fall upon the attentive, dignified figure of Kingsley Shacklebolt, and the tension would return, turning her thin shoulders to sculptures of unyielding stone.  

     The meeting was adjourned at half-past ten, and though her colleagues filed out, talking dispiritedly amongst themselves, she remained where she was, her shoulders slumped and her eyes burning with exhaustion.  She and Dumbledore regarded one another in the silent room, and from his perch, Fawkes gave a mournful trill.  She kneaded the swollen, throbbing knuckles of her left hand with the thumb of her right.

     "Another round, Minerva?" Dumbledore asked, and gestured at the decanter of brandy on the edge of his desk.

     She opened her mouth to refuse, then reached down, picked up her tumbler, and held it out.  "Why not?" she said wearily.

     "Why not, indeed," he muttered, and filled her tumbler and then his own.

     She took a sip of the tart liquid and wilted in her chair.  "Do you suppose Shacklebolt will give Fudge a blow-by-blow account of our sordid plot?" she murmured wryly.

     "Oh, I expect Kingsley will perform his duty admirably," Dumbledore replied, and the tinge of bemusement in his voice made her pause in mid-sip.

     She raised an inquiring eyebrow at him.  "Don't tell me-he's a member of the Order."

     He beamed at her.  "Naturally."

     "I should have guessed.  How many others are there?"

     He tapped his chin with his forefinger.  "Ten, though Nymphadora is only in the auxiliary reserves.  She is on the day shift that guards Severus.  Kingsley and Dawlish are on the night watch.  But that isn't what you wanted to discuss, is it?"

     Her eyes fell on the silver and jade serpent lying atop the parchment stack.  "No," she admitted.

     He followed her gaze and picked it up, turning it delicately between his fingers.  "You're right, you know," he said quietly.  "I don't want to see this on anyone else."

     Her heart broke at the doleful timbre of his voice, and she reached out to cover his hands with her own.  "Oh, Albus."  She couldn't think of anything else to say.

     "You truly think him guilty, don't you Minerva?"  Though it was phrased as such, it wasn't really a question.

     For once in her life, she wished she were a better liar, or that she could make herself believe differently than she did, but she couldn't, so she said, "Yes, I do."  Seeing his crestfallen expression, she plunged onward.  "What else am I supposed to believe?  He was a Death Eater.  Not maybe, not almost.  _Was, Albus.  You told me yourself that the night he came to you, he was drenched in someone's blood.  Good people don't lurch into their former Headmaster's office spattered in their victim's blood."  _

     "Everyone makes mistakes, Minerva."

     "Burning the toast is a mistake, Albus; breaking a vase is a mistake; sleeping through a meeting is a mistake.  What he did was a sin.  A filthy, vile, unpardonable sin.  He took a person's life for no other reason than he could.  Merlin knows what else he's done."  She fell silent and mentally implored him to understand.

     "How many people did you kill in the First and Second Wars?"

     She blinked, taken aback by the unexpected question.  "I-I don't know.  Thirty, maybe forty."

     "And how many were you indirectly responsible for?"  He looked at her with unsettling solemnity.

     "What?  I don't see what this has got to do with anything," she protested.

     "Humor an old man," he insisted.

     "Heaven knows," she conceded.  "Hundreds, perhaps."  She swallowed against a sudden wave of nausea.

     "I'm responsible for thousands.  Thousands upon thousands.  I led sons and daughters to their deaths and ordered those who survived to kill still more.  My wife died because of me."  His voice caught in his throat.

     "Albus-,"

     "I've watched two generations of our finest tear themselves to ribbons in the name of ideas, and now I stand on the cusp of watching a third suffer the same fate.  I cannot help but wonder-what if I am wrong?"

     "Wrong about what?  You can't possibly think the Dark Lord is right?" she demanded, frightened at his hopeless, strengthless demeanor.

     "Absolutely not, but what if I am no better?  What would be awaiting us when we stood before the Fates?  What if I am also the destroyer of countless innocent lives?  Would there be mercy or only retribution?  I pray for the former; if there is only the latter, there isn't enough fire in Hades to atone for what I have done."

     She goggled at him and sputtered in inarticulate horror.  "You-," she croaked when she found her voice, "you're not God, Albus.  You can't grant him absolution.  You can't protect him."

     His eyes grew distant and melancholy.  "Protect him," he murmured, more to himself than to her.  "Sometimes I fear I didn't protect him enough."  He shook his head and rose slowly from his chair.  "I'm going to bed.  I'm very tired."  He offered her a thin smile and patted her on one narrow shoulder.  "I'll see you in the morning."  Sleep well, Minerva."

     _Not bloody likely.  I'll see the dawn, and so will you," _she thought as she watched him climb the staircase with careful gravity, his steps frail and ginger, the steps of a man clinging to the last wisps of his lifethread.  She watched until his heavy chamber door snicked closed behind him, and when she was certain no one would see, she fled the office at a near-run and went to lose herself in the sparse and painful comfort of the Glenfiddich in her armoire.  

        


	33. Crisis of Faith

Chapter Thirty-Three

     While his colleagues were busy forming plans for his absence and burying their worry beneath the warmth of barrel-aged brandy, Snape sat alone in his chambers at looked at everything without seeing any of it.  His hands bunched in his lap, cold ivory, and he watched them tremble with suppressed rage.  He longed for a nip of Ogden's Old Firewhiskey, but he was frozen on the austere sofa, bolted there by his fury.

     The Headmaster had stripped him, _Albus_ had stripped him of the title he had earned every minute of his teaching life, plucked it from his collar just as neatly as you please.  Wouldn't Minerva be pleased?  Wouldn't they _all_ be pleased?  The miserable, nasty git, the tyrannical bastard with impossible standards, the persecutor of innocent, bleating first-years and Gryffindors, had been laid low at last, toppled by the malice he had so relished wielding against them.  

     No doubt the overjoyed pupils were cavorting in the corridors and Common Rooms, stuffing themselves with Canary Creams and chocolate frogs, speculating about their future in Potions, and dreaming of some weak-kneed fop who would allow them to do whatever they pleased.  Neville Longbottom, he supposed, was probably having the first erotic experience of his useless life fantasizing about newfound freedom beyond the reach of his lash.

     Damn the lot of them, the Headmaster included.  Especially the Headmaster.  His lip curled in a reflexive snarl as he remembered the soft brush of fingertips against the pressed and starched collar of his robes, and his own jittering fingers unfurled and came up to touch the place where the unassailable mark of his authority had rested for the last seventeen years.  His jaw creaked when searching fingertips found only two tiny pinpricks where the pin's dainty fastener had pierced fabric as though it were penitent flesh.

     _Trust in me, Severus._  Words that once held salvation now mocked him.

     He had been a fool to believe, to even dare hope that the Headmaster, unlike so many others, would keep his word.  He should have known better, but he had been so desperate for an ally that he had ignored the warning cry inside his head.  Anything, he had told himself with the rabid conviction of the drowning, would be better than where he was, where he _had been_.  So he had traded one master for another.

     _Trust in me, Severus._  _Have faith in the Light._

     That was what the Headmaster had told him all those years ago as he had stood before him in blood-sodden robes and reeking of death.  Such a balm those words had been to him then, but he found no comfort in them now.  In fact, they reminded him of what Voldemort had told him the night he was initiated.  He closed his eyes and kneaded his forehead with fisted hands, and the soft, seductive voice of Voldemort grazed his ears with cold fingers.

     _Trust in me, young Severus, and all that you wish shall be yours.  _No doubt, no hesitation, just simple, erotic surety.

     And Merlin help him, Lord Voldemort had been right at first.  All that had been denied the dour, greasy boy whom everyone despised in equal measure was suddenly within his reach.  What he wanted, he took, and if anyone had the temerity to protest, they were silenced.  The haughty, jeering girls that had spurned his awkward advances paid for their cheek.  What they would not give him willingly, he had taken with bloody, brutal force, and when he was done, when he could not stand to look at their red, tear-stained, swollen faces, when the sight of the bruises rising on their cheeks, throat, and thighs from his merciless hands sickened him and the sound of their terrified wails infuriated him beyond reason, he had killed them with two simple words.  All his problems cleansed in a flash of emerald green.

     His stomach churned at the grotesque recollections, and his mouth twisted upwards in a grim rictus that bore little resemblance to a smile.  Funny that he was so revolted by his actions seventeen years too late.  At the time, hands smeared with blood and buried to the hips between the legs of a screaming girl, he had given them no thought whatsoever.  He had simply reacted, surrendered to the fathomless rage that infected his mind with an unquenchable need for vengeance and the desire to punish them and make them as weak as he had once been.  Their piteous pleas for mercy were throttled by the memory of their leering, laughing rejection, and when their lifeless, ravaged bodies had lain sprawled at his feet, he had been able to feel only a smug, dizzy satisfaction.

     If he were in the mood for rationalization, he could have reassured himself that such bilious hatred had been a result of Voldemort's indoctrination, but he knew it was not so.  The anger had always been there, lurking beneath his skin and in his heart.  Voldemort had merely given him the excuse to grant it free rein.  For so long, he had bottled it up, pushed it down, ashamed, and terrified at its potency.  He had often wondered if he was losing his mind.  Then Voldemort and the Death Eaters, and at long last, he had been in the right.  _He _had been the righteous crusader.  Everything he had ever thought had been true.  They did deserve to suffer, and so he had punished them.

     The man he had become recognized the grotesquerie in such thinking, the utter perversity of it, but the days of his youth had not allowed for honest reflection, and the down-trodden, furious child that had responded so eagerly to the Dark Lord's lure had seen only the opportunity to avenge himself with impunity.  What wronged child would not have seized it?

     _There is no excuse for what you have done._

     He snorted.  He had no illusions about that.  There would be no salvation for him, no reprieve from the fires he had stoked with every pernicious, sadistic wave of his wand.  There was only one end for him, and he deserved it.  Part of him longed for it.  He wanted to face his judgment and have done with it.  

     _Perhaps the wait is part of your penance.  Perhaps this is your hell, and the Fates will not permit you to taste the sweet freedom of death until you have rendered every ounce of flesh and every drop of blood that your atrocities demand._

If that were so, he would never die.  He would roam the earth forever, and when his body collapsed and crumbled to bones and tainted dust, his spirit would remain tethered here, wandering the paths he had so often trod in life in the futile search for absolution.  Should the Dementor win his soul, his body would wither in the dank, rotten bowels of Azkaban, but it would never die.  His twisted heart would beat on and on, beat even as his blood curdled in his veins, and as the years turned to decades and then into centuries, Mediwizards would come to marvel at him, the Body That Would Not Die.

     _If you are so eager to die, then why do you cling so tightly to the tattered threads of your life?  Why no go without a struggle?_

     _Because it is my life.  _Mine.  _Slytherins do not easily cede that which is theirs, and no man lays down his life without fighting for it.  Even the most repulsive martyr will not give his life without a greater cause to give it meaning.  That feckless twit Fudge has no right to it, and I cannot let him take it until my contrition is done._

_     That still doesn't explain why you are so angry with Dumbledore._

His lip curled.  That was simple.  Dumbledore had given him hope.  When those long, deft fingers had pinned the Slytherin serpent onto the collar of his robes and smiled, his heart, long still inside his cold chest, had begun to beat again.  He had been lifted from the dirt and the mire into a position of power, of respectability.  For the first time in his life, someone had entrusted him with true power.  The idea that there might one day be peace for him had taken root in the stony, pragmatic soil of his heart, and for seventeen years, he had nurtured it with his blood, sweat, and tortured screams.

     Now that fragile bloom was crushed, wrested from him by the very hands that had planted it.  That the Headmaster's eyes had been filled with anguish as he had done so made little difference.  All that mattered was the knowledge that the Headmaster had taken from him the only thing he had ever earned by his own merit.  His chance for atonement was gone.  The protection he had been promised on the night the scales had fallen from his bulging eyes was nowhere to be found.

     _You should have seen that coming._

He should have, at that.  He had seen the Headmaster's "fairness" at work before.  Fifteen and standing in the Headmaster's office with furious tears drying on his cheeks, he had watched the man he would come to love dismiss the travesty his beloved Gryffindor Golden Children had wrought on him for no other reason than they could.  What would have cost him a month's detention and a letter to his parents had cost Potter and his minions a night's detention with McGonagall.  Lupin had even been allowed to retain his Prefect's badge.  He, Severus, had received neither consolation nor justice for his humiliation.

     He had known then that the Headmaster's justice was the justice of expediency, of that which served him best, but he had forgotten that along the way, and when the poisonous thought had reared its head from time to time as he shivered in the infirmary, he pushed it aside.  After all, the Headmaster was always there when he regained his senses, solemn blue eyes peering solicitously over the rims of his half-moon spectacles.  He had taken it as a sign of his faith and professed affection.  Now he wasn't sure.

     _Likely praying I'll not die before he can prise the latest bits of information from my bloody, cracked lips, _he thought bitterly.

     He knew he was being irrational and unjust, but, trapped like a beast in the very rooms that had been his haven, he could not care.  He suspected that were he and Potter's positions reversed, the good Headmaster would have risked treason to secure Harry the right to roam the castle as he wished.  He would be flanked be a cadre of not-so-inconspicuous Aurors, but his movements would still be his own, and he would be allowed to bear witness to his defamation and fatal ruin, not shut up in his rooms like the oblivious fatted calf.

     Hatred for the boy welled inside his chest, and he growled behind clenched teeth.  Stupid, wretched anathema, he was.  The moment the little prat had set foot upon the ancient stone floors, his life had ceased to be his own.  Every waking moment was spent fretting over what new catastrophe the boy's ineradicable brashness and holy, prophesied name would bring down upon their heads.  Had he not had the galling indecency to keel over and throw Hogwarts into chaos, the Headmaster had ordered him to begin tutoring the ungrateful wretch in Occlumency.

     If Potter recovered and managed to survive the coming war against Voldemort, he, Snape, would gladly wring his victorious neck.  It wasn't as if he would be vital to the cause-there would no longer be one.  The sanctified brat had destroyed everything, and he would never forgive him for it.  James Potter had been dead and moldering in his tomb for fourteen years, and not a day passed when he did not curse his name.  It would be no different with the son.

     His thoughts turned to the Slytherins.  He had never been deeply involved with the day-to-day affairs of the House or its secret, petty politics, though he was well aware of their unspoken hierarchy.  Draco Malfoy was their student leader; it was a position held by the Malfoys since the House's founding, and Draco's appalling lack of common sense would not change that one whit.  It would fall to him to decide what action the House would take.

     Which meant, in all likelihood, that there would be _no _action from that quarter aside from petulant missives to his father.  Draco would never dirty his hands if it could be helped, and truthfully, he had little to gain and much to lose by raising a row on his behalf.  His name had never been of much value, even in Death Eater circles, and with the world soon to link it to the attempted murder to its beloved princeling hero, it would be lower than the worthless soil beneath an indigent's feet.  Even Draco would see the wisdom in staying out of the fray.

     _What about Lucius?_

     He rose from the couch with a sardonic snort and stalked into the kitchen.  If Draco's help was doubtful, then Lucius' discreet absence was a certainty.  His welcome with the Death Eaters was waning, and as Voldemort's premier toady and second-in-command, Lucius would be the first to distance himself.  In fact, when the time came, he would probably be the one to assassinate him.  If he recalled correctly, Malfoy's favored weapon was poison.

     In spite of the circumstances, he smirked.  That would never work, he was afraid.  His long, crooked Potions Master's nose would alert him to any toxins in his food or drink, and in any case, he would never be so foolhardy as to accept either from his former compatriot.  Thus, the means of his death, if not the frozen, avaricious lips of a Dementor was a silver dagger embossed with the Malfoy crest on blade and hilt.  It was a sleek, coldly beautiful weapon he had seen used times beyond reckoning, and he had often marveled at its craftsmanship as its owner slid it into the breastbone of a screaming wizard.

     For all his fastidious care in the public eye-the perfectly coiffed hair, the magnificent robes, the cultured, clipped, mellifluous voice-Lucius was a sadistic killer.  He reveled in the sundering of spirit from the flesh that housed it.  A classically beautiful man as he strolled imperiously through the streets, he was the seraphim that bore his name when in the orgasmic throes of a kill.  The shimmering corona of platinum-blond hair threw sparks when the markless death flew from his upraised wand, and he shuddered in wordless ecstasy when a Pureblood traitor's life ebbed over his hands.  Should he fall by Lucius' unwavering hand, he would die with the knowledge that, for the first time in his life, he had given someone genuine pleasure.

     No Lucius, no Draco, and no Headmaster.  Who remained to stand for him?   He opened the cupboard and pulled out a teacup.

     _There's Stanhope._

     He groaned.  If a prying cripple with the singular ability to drive him to frothing distraction was his only hope, he was doomed.  She possessed neither the physical stamina nor the vicious cunning to take on a legion of Ministry officials.  She might have an inkling that a miscarriage of justice was afoot, but she had no powerful father to force the hands of the powers that be, and no deep pockets with which to sway them.  She was an outsider, a misshapen, perpetually bedraggled interloper with no established credibility and an unsettling countenance reminiscent of Dark seers and ill-bred hags.  She could proclaim his innocence from the rooftops in the clarion voice of inevitable truth, and no one would pay her any mind.

     Even if she did manage to convince someone that she wasn't a raving loon who saw conspiracies beneath every bed and around every corner, she had no concrete evidence with which to prove her assertions.  Hallucinatory visions and waking fugues were lent scant credence even when experienced by affirmed and universally acclaimed seers, and Miss Stanhope was neither.  They would laugh in her face.

     To be perfectly blunt, unless the true culprit presented himself to Fudge and sang, "Avada Kedavra Alleluia," he would not see thirty-eight.  He filled a kettle with water, set it on the burner, and prodded it with the tip of his wand to ignite a flame.  He could have turned on the burner by hand, he supposed, but he suspected that his days of being permitted to use magic were drawing to a close, and he wanted to exercise the dying right before it was snatched from him, feel the heady, crisp surge of it in his veins.

     They would be coming tonight.  The Aurors and Fudge would barge in and trample everything beneath their thoughtless, vindictive feet and leave his well-ordered world in ruins.  They would ransack his drawers and confiscate his papers, and they would expect him to thank them for it.  A simmering ball of rage and dim dread settled in the pit of his stomach.  He prized his privacy and long-standing anonymity, and the thought of their entitled, bureaucratic hands pawing through the sparse treasury of his earthly possessions made bile rise in his throat.

     It would be ridiculous of him to rail that they had no right to do such a thing.  He knew very well that they did, and even if they hadn't, they would have invented the right on the spot.  That was the nature of the governmental beast-to find the means to acquire that which did not belong to it under the guise of absolute moral rectitude.  If the means did not exist, then they spun it from the soil and the air and told the disbelieving public that it had been there all the while, unseen until brought to light by their wise and humble hands.

     He snorted.  _No wonder Gryffindors make such successful politicians.  Not much of a leap._

     The kettle intruded upon his morose musings with a petulant wail, and he extinguished the flame beneath it with an absent flick of the wrist and poured its steaming contents into the waiting teacup.  He was just reaching for the teaspoon when the door to his chambers crashed open, and Fudge strode into the parlor, flanked by a dozen scrupulously blank Aurors.  

     "Severus Snape, by order of the Ministry of Magic, your premises will now be searched.  Refusal to cooperate will result in immediate removal to Azkaban.  Do you understand?" Fudge trumpeted, and before he could reply, the Aurors swung into action.

     "_Expelliarmus!" _snarled Dawlish, and Snape's wand flew from his hand with traitorous ease.  

     "Wouldn't want you to get ideas, now, would we?" purred Fudge, and though he wore an expression of bland composure, his eyes danced with malevolent glee.  

     _You bastard, _Snape thought savagely, but he remained silent, numberless curses imprisoned behind his clenched teeth.

     It grew harder to remain mute as he watched the Aurors systematically destroy all that he owned.  They tore his book collection to pieces, ripped the yellowing pages from their leather bindings and let them flutter to the floor, felled albatrosses.  They overturned the furniture and pulled the linens from his bed.  They wrenched the rugs from the floor and gouged ruthless holes in the stone beneath searching for hollowed alcoves in the floor.

     The blood pulsed in his temples, and his hands fisted behind his back, quivering.  They were so calm about it all, so nonchalant.  One Auror was laughing as he wrenched the drawers from his desk and spilled their secrets onto the floor.  Another was sniggering to a comrade about the state of his utilitarian underclothes and holding up a particularly tatty pair for the rest of them to see.  Fudge laughed heartily and shot him a gloating, toothy leer.

     Cold hatred settled over his bones like rheumatic fever, and he blinked to clear his eyes of a sudden red haze.  He despised them all.  He longed to see them writhing at his feet, bathed in the warm red glow of Cruciatus, longed to feel the jolt of absolute power in his temples and in his groin.  He wanted them to scream and weep and gibber as he had done so often in the name of protecting useless Potter and making sure that their disorganized, tottering kingdom did not collapse.  He wanted to hear them howl that their bones were being turned to wax inside their skin, to smell the sickly-sweet stench of their feces in his nostrils like aphrodisiacal incense.

     _Steady, steady.  Lose your head, and the Headmaster's sacrifice of a life debt will be for nothing._

For once, the thought of the Headmaster did nothing to quell his anger.  In fact, it increased it.  If it weren't for him, there would be no reason to restrain himself.  But the dotty, unrepentant Gryffindor had bound him by something stronger than honor, stronger than oath.  Loath as he was to admit it, he still loved him, and he would not betray that love for the satisfaction throttling an Auror might bring.

     Things might not have turned out as they did had not a particularly zealous Auror gone into his kitchen, opened his cupboards, and begun tossing his china to the floor, where it shattered with a hellish, merry tinkle.  He was humming as he did so.

     Sound vanished from his world, and the scope of his vision narrowed to the jagged shards of tea rose china strewn across the floor like delicate shrapnel.  It had been his mother's china, a gift from _her_ mother on her wedding day, and it was the only thing for which she had ever had the temerity to fight his father.  In one of his drunken stupors, his father had decided it would be great sport to break it, and his mother, defying her own terror, had tried to stop him.

     She had paid for her audacity with curses and sharp, cracking blows to the face, and later, during the worst of it, with heavy, meaty fists to the stomach.  Well could he remember that night.  He still dreamed of it, thrashed in the clutches of its lingering ghost when night fell and the nightmares claimed him.  Eight years old and huddled in the corner with tears and snot streaming down his face, flinching with every curse and blow, every sobbing plea from his weeping mother.  She had never stopped begging for that china, even after a solid boot from his enraged father had sent her sprawling across the dining room floor.  And when his father had tired of the game and staggered from the room in search of more Firewhiskey, she had huddled over the broken pieces as though they were her shattered children.

     He had saved the rest.  For her.  Long after he was sure his parents were soundly asleep, he had crept down the carpeted staircase to the dining room and retrieved what remained of the china from its place in the cabinet.  When the last of it was cradled precariously in his trembling arms, he had slipped noiselessly into the immaculate tea garden and buried it, clawing up the dirt until his hands were scraped and raw and filthy, soil caked beneath the crescents of his fingers like ill-concealed sin.  

     One by one, he had pressed the teacups and the saucers and the teapot into the damp hole, muttering imprecations against his father, a holy liturgy against the devil.  They gleamed like polished bone in the moonlight, and he had wept as he worked, the memory of his mother hunched and weeping more potent than the knotted lash.  When he had finished, he had returned to his room and scrubbed his wounded, chapped hands until they bled.  

     When his mother noticed the absence of her prized heirloom, she had wept silently, but she had never mentioned them again, and though he had longed to tell her what had become of them, he hadn't dared, for fear that his father would unearth them and break them for spite.  She had gone to her early grave believing that his father had destroyed them as punishment for some imagined slight, and they had remained in their subterranean bower until his father died.  His sire's cooling corpse had not yet settled in its eternal cocoon when he had gone to the tea garden and unearthed them as he had buried them, with his bare hands.  He had brought them back to Hogwarts nestled in his arms and protected by a Cushioning Charm, and they had stayed in his kitchen cupboards, undisturbed by any hands save his own.  Until now.

     He did not know why he moved.  There was nothing he could have done.  His wand was clutched in Cornelius Fudge's pudgy hand, and even if had been in possession of it, the Aurors would have cut him down before he could raise it, but he had wanted to make him stop, to protect what he could of his mother's china.  He hadn't torn his eight-year old hands to ribbons just to see it reduced to powder by a snot-nosed Auror whom he had probably taught not long ago.

     In any case, it gave Fudge the excuse he had, no doubt, been looking for.  With a sweeping flourish, the Minister turned his own wand against him.

     "_Petrificus Totalus!"_ he crowed.

     Snape felt his body stiffen in mid-step, his joints and muscles suddenly lifeless as stone.  He toppled backward with a jarring thump and found himself gazing unblinkingly at his shadowy ceiling.  A moment later, Fudge's smug visage obscured his vision like a malignant eclipse.  He would have snarled were he able, but the living rigor mortis of the Body Bind did not allow it.  Nor could he close his eyes to shut out the repugnant sight.

     "My, my," clucked Fudge, shaking his head dolefully, "looks as though I was right to remove your wand.  You have quite a temper.  But then, I know all about that, don't I?"  He gave a humorless chuckle.  "Oh, indeed.  But Dumbledore tidied _that_ up.  What are a few unspeakable atrocities when he would make _such_ a _useful _spy.?"  He reached down and gave him a condescending pat on the cheek.  Then he looked to his subordinates.  "Get him up."

     Twin blue blurs floated on the hazy periphery of his vision, and then he was seized beneath the armpits and dragged to his feet.  Fudge surveyed him with a contemptuous sneer.  "Not so lordly now, are you?" he said quietly.  

     Vocal cords seized by the iron grip of the spell, he could give no reply.  He could not even quiver with outrage.  The only outlet left to him was his gaze, and into it he poured his rage and hatred and contempt, willing it to convey what his paralyzed tongue could not.  His eyeballs burned with the effort, and he wished with all his heart that looks could kill, that the blistering heat from his furious stare would reduce the porcine, preening man before him to so much smoldering ash.

     Fudge smirked as if he sensed the thought.  "Something the matter?" he asked, disingenuous concern smeared across his face like cheap greasepaint.  "Oh, how silly of me.  You can't answer."  He raised his own wand this time.  _"Finite incantatem."_

     Snape's knees buckled, and he sagged gracelessly between his captors before he recovered himself.  Someone behind him sniggered, and he vowed that when the opportunity presented itself, he would discover their identity and settle the matter.  The thought gave him vicious satisfaction.  He blinked to moisten his tortured eyes and watched Fudge circle him, a bloated buzzard surveying a particularly succulent acquisition.

     "Something the matter?" Fudge repeated.

     "He dropped my mother's china," he hissed.

     Fudge froze, thunderstruck.  "Your mother's china?" he sputtered.  

     "Yes," Snape answered through gritted teeth.  His head ached from the surge of blood in his temples, and his jaw gave an ominous creak.

     Fudge threw back his head and laughed, a harsh, ragged bark in the otherwise perfect stillness.  Then he drew closer, until his hot, stale breath brushed Snape's cheek, an invisible and maddening miasma.  Snape's burning skin recoiled from the contact.

     "You seem to be under the unfortunate illusion that you have rights," Fudge purred, "or that I would even bother to recognize them if you did.  Dumbledore has coddled you for far too long.  I'm afraid you need to be put in your place."  He looked to the Auror who had dropped the teacup.  "Destroy them all."

     Snape uttered an inarticulate oath and lunged forward, but the Aurors at his side held fast, and Fudge pressed his wand tip against his throat.

     "Now, Severus, I thought we had learned our lesson, but it seems you are most intractable.  No matter.  I'll gladly teach you another…harsher one."  Fudge tapped his wand into the meaty palm of his hand.

     Despite his dire circumstances, Snape rolled his eyes, unimpressed by the Minister's menacing theatrics.  "I believe I am already familiar with the lessons you have in mind," he snarled.

     Fudge tapped his chin, as though pondering this.  "Indeed, indeed.  And if I am not mistaken, the aftereffects of those lessons are most unpleasant.  I'm sure you wouldn't want these young Aurors to see you covered in your own filth.  Affront to your cosseted, ludicrous honor and all that."

     Snape growled.  He would sacrifice his honor for those teacups, his last tenuous link to a mother he had lost too soon and disappointed too often, but the realist in him knew it would be a fruitless endeavor.  There were too many of them, and not one of them gave a whit for the dubious rights of a Death Eater turncoat.  Fudge would make good on his threat; the Aurors would turn a blind eye.  He would writhe and scream beneath the Ministerial wand, and the china would still implode upon the unforgiving floor.

     In the end, he watched the grinning Auror sweep his mother's china to the floor piece by priceless piece.  He sang while he did it.  As each one exploded in a fullisade of scattershot porcelain, he remembered his mother's sad, pale form hunched protectively over the only bit of finery that had ever been all her own, watery mucus and blood commingled and dribbling down her face, and in his heart, the fragile, lofty tenets of hope and ultimate justice fostered so fervently by the Headmaster withered, throttled by an impotent, all-consuming despair and cancerous hatred.

     _Have faith in the Light, Severus,_ came the voice of the Headmaster, but it was distant, and tired, and he could find no conviction in it.

     "Well now," Fudge said as he went to inspect the carnage in the kitchen, "have we learned our lesson?"  He crouched over the glittering white shards and sifted through them with his forefinger.  He pinched some of the dust between his thumb and forefinger and looked up.  "Well done.  Thorough job."  He stood up with a muffled groan.

     "Thank you, Minister Fudge," said the Auror, and he snapped his heels together in a smart salute.

     Fudge inclined his head in gracious acknowledgment, grinding the soles of his gleaming boots into the pulverized remnants of his mother's china.  Then he strode to Snape once more, beady eyes brimming with sadistic triumph.

     "Well?" he prodded.  "Have you?"

     Snape considered him for a very long time, the sound of his own heartbeat thunderous in his ears.  "At least," he said at last, the words sweet and seductive on his tongue, "Voldemort is honest about being a soulless bastard."

     The reaction was immediate.  Several Aurors grunted as though something had knocked the wind out of them.  Still others, including the pair clutching his forearms, flinched and swayed on their feet.  The Auror that had so glibly desecrated his mother's meager legacy turned a satisfying shade of green and closed his eyes, as if to ward off a sudden attack of vertigo.

     Fudge, choleric with rage, turned a heretofore unobserved shade of plum, and before anyone realized what was happening, he slapped Snape across the face with a trembling hand.

     "I am nothing like…like _him_," he hissed, his eyes narrowed to agonized, reptilian slits.  "Dumbledore has protected you for too long, but not anymore.  Sooner or later, he'll make a mistake, and when he does, I'll have his job, and I promise you, you'll be in Azkaban with the rest of the filth.  And before I give you over to the Dementors, I'll make certain you suffer.  I'll do it myself."  He grimaced in a mad parody of a smile.

     Then, as though he realized how he must look, he sighed and smoothed his robes with long, exaggerated strokes.  "Now," he said calmly, "strip him."

     They handled his robes with the same disdain they had shown his other belongings.  They were jerked from his body with cold efficiency, and he distinctly heard a seam give way with a mournful purr.  His linen shirt was next, and then rude hands pawed at his trousers in a perverse facsimile of a lover's caress.

     _Not that you'd know anything about that.  All your experience has either been taken by force or paid for by the hour._

     He stiffened.  Now was not the time to ponder the abysmal state of his conjugal affairs.  The chill dungeon air stung his skin, made it ripple in knots of hard gooseflesh, and his exposed genitals contracted in an attempt to conserve precious heat, a fact not lost upon a gloating Fudge.

     "So much for the great Slytherin myth," he jeered, and several of his subordinates sniggered.

     "Minister.  I would have thought seeing Lucius Malfoy without his trousers would have answered that question for you years ago," he muttered blandly, but he was nearly blind with humiliation and anger.

     In truth, he had never seen Lucius in a state of undress, and he doubted Fudge had, either.  In fact, if Narcissa's drunken, disjointed ramblings were to be believed, Lucius was rather blessed, but that was neither here nor there.  All that mattered was striking out at the infuriatingly imperious Fudge, and if the renewed caul of apoplexy spreading over his face was any indication, he had achieved his end.

     "Enjoy your insipid cheek while you can," Fudge snarled, his voice hoarse with rage.  "Brandt," he said, speaking to someone Snape could not see, "full cavity search."

     "Yes, sir."  There was the rustle of shifting fabric, and Snape knew the man was searching for his wand.

     "No," Fudge snapped.  "No wand.  Do it manually."

     There was an uneasy silence at this proclamation, and then, "But, sir, the wand is quicker and more accurate, and besides, I have no gloves."  Timid, appalled.

     _Not so enthralling when it's your hands that get sullied, is it? _he thought savagely.  _Besides, your esteemed Minister doesn't give a damn about expediency or accuracy.  He never did._

     "I don't give a damn," Fudge roared.  "Just do as you're bloody well told.  I don't pay you to think."

     "Yes, sir," whispered the Auror, though he sounded revolted.

     Snape uttered not a sound throughout the whole ordeal.  He stood rigid as a tent pole and bit the inside of his cheek until the bitter, coppery taste of his own blood filled his mouth, but he did not flinch.  He would not give them the satisfaction.  He would go to his death without a word before he would let them see his weakness.  And with every beat of his heart, his hatred blossomed into a dark and deadly flower.

     When the Auror was finished, he withdrew and pronounced, in a weak and sickened mutter, that there was nothing to be found.  Then Snape heard him reach for his wand and whisper, "_Scourgify!" _ as though it were a prayer for the dying.  Under other circumstances, he would have found the man's desperation amusing, but now he was too tired and lost to feel anything at all.  He just wanted them to go and leave him to pick up the shattered remains of his violated dignity.

     "Well," said Fudge briskly, vague disappointment stamped on his florid face, "I think we'll withdraw for now, but we reserve the right to enter the premises at any time and seize whatever we see fit.  Refusal to cooperate, will, of course, result in immediate transfer to Azkaban."  He straightened his robes again and continued.  "In the meantime, your wand is confiscated, and any magic will constitute a violation of your provisional liberty here at Hogwarts."

     _Provisional liberty._  The phrase made his stomach churn.  

     Fudge strutted out, flanked by his gaggle of sycophantic Aurors, some of whom clutched sheaves pf parchment to peruse in search of subversive rhetoric against the Fudge regime or a full confession to the attempted murder of Potter.  What they would find was execrable, meandering essays on the proper preparation of Pepper-Up Potion and lists of ingredients he needed to order from the apothecary in Hogsmeade.  More power to them.

     When the last of them had filed out, he stood and stared at what was left of his home.  Everything was in ruins.  His book collection had been ravaged, his furniture broken and overturned, his floor gouged and cratered, and without his wand, he could repair none of it.  A debilitating sense of ennui flooded over him, and he longed to sink to the floor, wrap his frozen arms around his strengthless knees and drift into a numb stupor, but he forced himself to shamble to his torn robes and pick them up.  His shaking fingers slipped through a gaping rend in the fabric.

     He put them on without thinking, his bony shoulder protruding from the hole, and shuffled to the mound of broken china.  All grace had left him, leeched from his suddenly brittle bones by the memory of Fudge's smirking face, and when he squatted over the jagged pieces, he flopped like a marionette whose strings had been severed.  

     He picked them up and cradled them in his hands, numb, unwieldy fingers trying in vain to put them together again.  He growled in frustration.  Why couldn't he fix it?  Why couldn't he make it right?

     "Damn you, Potter," he spat in a voice he did not recognize, a voice clogged with denied grief.  "Damn you!"

     "Professor," said a deep, gentle voice from behind him.  Kingsley.

     "Get out!" he snarled.  Get out!  I don't want your Gryffindor pity."  His hands snapped closed around the shards, and blood trickled from his palms.

     He knew Kingsley was still there.  He could feel the insistent press of his presence against his back.  He closed his eyes and concentrated on the throbbing sting of his lacerated hands.

     "I was in Ravenclaw, Professor."  A sigh, and then the soft snick of the door being closed.

     He was alone again.  When he was sure his legs would support him, he stood and went to sit on the sofa, where he clutched his mother's china and looked at nothing.  He stayed that way for a very long time.


	34. Phoenix and Mongoose

Chapter Thirty-Four

The phrase, "curried marbles" is one I discovered while reading Terry Pratchett, and though it is not copyrighted, I just thought I'd extend my thanks for coining such a wondrous phrase

       When Rebecca lurched into Potions on Thursday afternoon, her tattered nerves were at the breaking point.  Her head throbbed from too little sleep and too much care, and the hand wrapped around her control stick jittered with exhaustion.  She didn't dare close her eyes, for fear that she would slump where she sat and drift into troubled dreams.  She blinked in a futile attempt to clear her burning eyes of the gauzy fog that had shrouded them since late Wednesday evening, when she had abruptly and completely lost the ability to read a single line put in front of her.

     She stifled a yawn as she rolled to her customary place and concentrated on not looking at the abandoned and forlorn professor's desk at the front of the room.  The muscles of her lower back screamed in protest as she bent to adjust the hem of her robes, and she grimaced, hand fisting in the thick fabric.  She was not surprised that the spasms should find her now and in this place; she had expected it.  She had been dreading the first lesson without Professor Snape, and now that it had arrived, her body was expressing its unease the only way it could, in the only manner her stubborn will could not subjugate.  She could suppress the tears and ignore the unrelenting fatigue, but she could neither hide nor dismiss the strident, accusatory protests of her bones and sinew.

     _Damn you,_ she berated her body, and it immediately retaliated with a monstrous, wrenching spasm that jabbed its fiery tines into the small of her back.

     She bit the inside of her cheek and swallowed a grunt, counting off the seconds until the tension abated and left a dull, hollow throb.  Neville, seated beside her, frowned.

     "You all right?" he asked.

     "I'm fine," she snarled.  He had been unduly enthusiastic about a Potions lesson without his tormentor, and though the rational part of her understood his glee in the face of imminent liberation, she could not forgive him for it.

     _By all rights, you should feel the same,_ her grandfather pointed out, and she stifled a groan, prompting another surreptitious glance from Neville.

     She wasn't in the mood for his pithy proselytizing at the moment, no matter how logical.  She was exhausted and frightened, and her anger, though misplaced and utterly useless, comforted her.  It filled the empty spaces left by Professor Snape's conspicuous absence, and so long as it festered inside her closely guarded heart, she didn't feel quite so impotent and confused.  It was better than feeling nothing at all, and it had kept her up and moving far longer than any righteous and honorable idealism would have.

     Her mouth twisted in a sardonic smirk.  Funny how that worked.  All her life, her teachers and the preacher at the Baptist church she sometimes attended during the holidays had extolled the virtues of love and Christian charity, of turning the other cheek and being a holy vessel of the Lord Thy God, and for a while, when the breath of God had not yet faded from her fragile lungs, she had believed them.  But life was a far crueler and better teacher than the hapless preacher, who cowered in the corner with his upraised Bible and dared not touch himself lest the Lord strike him blind.  Life had disabused her of all those sentimental notions with a single roundhouse slap, and once the scales had fallen from her eyes, she could not put them back again.

     Love didn't make the world go 'round.  It never had and never would.  She had learned that in second grade when a boy with Spina Bifida had made the mistake of trying to steal her crayons and calling her a crybaby when she protested.  After the momentary paralyzing hurt, anger had bloomed, hot and sweet, an intoxicating honey that blotted out reason and the Golden Rule.  She had wanted to hurt the boy, make him suffer more than she did, and so, without preamble, she had reached over and flipped his flimsy aluminum wheelchair onto its side.  He had spilled out and broken his nose on the thinly carpeted floor.  

     There had been the briefest pang of guilt as she watched him scream and clutch his broken, bleeding nose, but it had been overpowered by the euphoric satisfaction of knowing that for once, she had not been on the receiving end, that someone else had gotten thrown off the great carousel.  And though she had wept when the teacher scolded her, it had not been from sorrow for what she had done to the boy, but for the disappointment and incomprehension on the teacher's face, the realization that Mrs. Hopkins would never see the world the way she did.

     She had never forgotten that first taste of the forbidden, of the dark and powerful emotions the adults had tried so hard to keep from her.  Once she became aware of anger's existence, she embraced it, nurtured it, fed on it.  It was to it, not love, that she turned when the odds grew insurmountable.  Unlike love and hope, which were easily discouraged, it had never yet faltered.  It required neither maintenance nor conscious thought.  She had only to open her eyes, and it was there, as raw and vibrant as ever.  Its bitter draught had sustained her through the long, inexorable hours of her best friend's death, and it would not desert her now.

     She wondered what McGonagall would think of such dystopian musings, then decided she didn't give a damn.  Whether McGonagall liked it or not, it was true.  Anger drove the world and everything in it.  Even the lofty notions of Gryffindor House were fueled by it.  What was justice if not anger at some great wrong?  They called it by different names, of course.  Anger was such a dirty word.  Nobility.  Righteousness.  Divine retribution.  All sounded cleaner, purer than anger and hatred and spite upheld by rule of law, but they boiled down to the same.  Anger had been behind every major war and movement in the history of mankind.  Men of God had killed in the name of peace, and men of color had taken to the streets to take by force of their united anger what words of wisdom could not coax from furious white fingers.  

     Anger at the wind and fire-snuffing rain had built civilization, and anger towards one another would one day tear it down.  It was the Ministry's anger at the harming of their sacred child that had given this blind witch hunt life, and it was her anger on Professor Snape's behalf that would see the lopsided battle to its end.

     _All very nice, _said her grandfather, _but what does it have to do with my original point?  Why don't you hate the professor as much as Neville does?  He certainly hasn't treated you any better._

     Because… 

     Because, why?  It was a question she had never stopped to ask herself.  She had simply reacted.  It was not a reasoning governed by logic.  She knew she should hate him after all his petty cruelty and cold disregard for her feelings, but she could not.  Each time she tried to rekindle the fury she had felt for the first two weeks of their acquaintance, she only succeeded in dredging up the haunting memory of his eyes as he looked at his handprint bruised into her flesh or the bleak despair that flitted across his face when he thought she could not see.  Over the interminable hours of their often hostile communion, hatred had become an impossibility.

     She could not recall when she had lost the ability to despise him as she ought.  It had not been a conscious decision.  It had simply faded away, eroded by disuse and neglect, and one night, when she had reached for it in a pique at a well-placed barb, it was not there.  There had been consternation and indignation and sullen reproach, but the eternal flame of venomous hatred had been extinguished, and in its place had been an inexplicable admiration and profound comfort.

     _Why?_

     _Because he makes no pretensions as to what he is.  He's a miserable bastard, and he's not the least bit sorry for it.  Not like McGonagall, who is every bit the bitch, but spends her life disguising her prejudices as maternal concern so no one raises an eyebrow.  He is what he is, and I'll never have to worry about him changing.  I'll never roll into his classroom or his private office and find him smiling and handing out Christmas baubles._

     She sniggered at the implausible image of Professor Snape, his thin mouth stretched from ear to ear in a jolly grin, bestowing each of his gobsmacked pupils with a dainty, shimmering, sliver Christmas tree bauble.  The day she witnessed him behaving in such a sentimental manner, she would denounce the blatant imposter and hurl herself down the nearest flight of stairs.  Meaningless, posturing pap was the province of the Gryffindor.

     _All right.  But if anger makes the world go 'round, and there's naught of love or compassion in the world, why bother?  Why not just let this happen? _her grandfather persisted, implacable as ever.

     _You don't quit, do you? _she retorted peevishly.

     _No.  A trait I believe you inherited, _came the smug reply.

     She fought the urge to beat her fists upon the arms of her chair.  _You stubborn old pain in the ass!  I don't _know_ why I just can't let this happen.  I just can't._  The urge to cry, so often with her these past few days, stirred in her thin chest, and she scowled, furious at her sudden attack of the hysterical feminine memes.

     _Is it because you're more Gryffindor than you care to admit?_

_     Hardly.  There's not going to be any adulation for getting Professor Snape off the hook.  Hell, they'll probably tar and feather me for ruining a perfect scapegoat._

_     No, but you want him to see you, and what better way to do it than to save his life?_

     If _I pull off this miracle, he'll be anything but grateful.  He'll resent owing me at all, much less for a life he despises.  It'll be his worst nightmare, a life debt to a cripple _and_ a Gryffindor.  I'd be better of letting him die, to tell the truth.  He'll never forgive me for it._

_     Then I ask again-why?_

She stiffened in her chair and wished for a switch with which to turn him off.  She was too tired for anything but sitting, and she wanted him to leave her alone.  _I told you, I don't know.  _She ran shaking fingers through her lackluster hair and sighed.

     _Yes, you do,_ her grandfather said, and his voice was surprisingly gentle.  _You just don't like the answer._

_     What is the answer then, since you seem to know it all?  _Defiant and shrill, much like McGonagall's voice when she was engaged in an outraged tirade on her behalf.  She flushed.

     _You don't believe that anger is all there is, not behind the bastion of cynicism you've built for yourself.  Deep in your heart, you know that love and mercy still exist, that there is such a thing as right and wrong.  If you didn't, you wouldn't have spared a single thought for Judith Pruitt, not lost a single minute of sleep over the fact that you did nothing to stop them.  You would never have shed a single tear for your friend after he was gone, but you did.  You cried until I thought the force of it would shake you to pieces._

_     I was angry,_ she countered, but it was a feeble protest, and she knew it.

     _Yes, _he conceded, _you were.  You were angry at God.  But you missed Bradley, missed him so much you thought you were dying, _wished_ you were so you could see him again, and that isn't a feeling born of anger or hatred.  You don't long for what you despise.  That comes from love, and whether you want to admit it or not, love lives in your heart._

_     I don't love Professor Snape.  Sometimes, I'm not even sure I like him._

_     You care about what happens to him, and that's enough.  You can prate all you want about being too jaded to feel anything but anger, but I know better.  And so do you._

She smiled in spite of herself.  _Why do you always have to be right?_

_     Somebody has to._

She guffawed and clapped a hand over her mouth.

     "Choking on your own spittle, Mudblood?" Malfoy drawled indolently from his perch in the rear of the classroom.  His cronies chortled, and Pansy Parkinson shrieked and clapped her hands, as though she had just heard the wittiest bon mot ever uttered.

     "Have a toss, why don't you?" Seamus retorted conversationally, without turning to look at his adversary.

     It was Rebecca's turn to chortle.  Succinct, that.  It was something her grandfather might have said.  Only the Irish could impart such cheerful eloquence to a "fuck you".

     "Think that's funny, do you?" Malfoy hissed, and the grating scrape of a bench being pushed back hung in the air.

     "Yes, actually," she muttered drily.  

     Constant stress had blunted her sense of prudence, and truth be told, she suspected a vicious confrontation would do her a world of good, get the blood racing in her veins again, rouse her from her logy stupor.  Even a sound loss was better than nothing.  She craved the acrid tang of adrenaline in her mouth and the exhilarating rush of undiluted hatred in the pit of her stomach.

     _So much for love finding a way, _her grandfather huffed, but in her mind's eye, she saw the mischievous glint in clouded blue eyes, and she laughed, her heart swelling with love remembered.  Malfoy was coming, probably to hex her out of her robes, but she didn't care.  For a few seconds, she was going to see the world in vibrant color.  She fumbled for her wand with a pinky, sweaty hand.

     Seamus leaped from his seat, wand raised.  His eyes blazed.  "Don't even think about it, Malfoy."  Rage had thickened his brogue to the point of near-incomprehensibility.  

     "Or you'll what?" Malfoy asked quietly.

     "I'll show-," Seamus began, but his answer was cut off by the arrival of the Headmaster, who paused in the doorway, an expression of mild surprise on his face.

     "I must confess that I did not expect to see students out of their seats with wands drawn."  He pushed his spectacles onto the bridge of his nose.  "Is there something I should know?" he asked, and looked from a white-knuckled Seamus to a scowling Malfoy.

     "No, Headmaster," Malfoy answered coolly, his tone polite but not at all contrite, and then came the sound of his wand being stowed inside his robes again.    Rebecca twisted in her seat and saw that he was less than a foot from the back of her chair.  Close enough to touch.

     _Do it.  Reach out and touch him.  Draw your fingers across his flesh and see if he is truly fashioned of sculpted ice.  Is he cold to the touch, or will he burn you like cleansing fire?_

_     Steel silk,_ she though for no reason at all.  _He feels like steel silk._  _Smooth as glass and seductive as the caress of spun silk between heated thighs, but hard and cruel as frozen steel beneath that glorious, refined face._

     The temptation to touch his forbidden flesh was so strong that her wand hand relaxed its tenacious grip on the polished wooden handle in preparation for the furtive trip to the unguarded flesh of his cheek, but then reason hastily reasserted itself, and she faced front again with a mortified flush.  If she touched Draco Malfoy, nothing would stop him from avenging the taint of her touch, not even the Headmaster.  His wand would emerge from the snug woolen cloister of his winter robes with the speed of a striking cobra, and before an apoplectic Seamus and a dumbstruck Neville could even clamber from their seats, the damage would be done.  And she had no doubt that the Curse would be neither quick nor painless.

     _So?  Let it come.  You _need _it.  You need the hatred and the anger and the lunatic rush of magic scalding your palm as thought becomes Curse and wish becomes deed.  You need that eye-opening jolt that only furious magic can provide.  You all do.  _

     That much was true.  The past few days had been rife with seething tension.  The cold stone walls were damp and pungent with the sweat of a student body straining in the bonds of unwanted sanctions.  The air was sharp with the tangy scent of festering resentments and belligerent discord, and underneath the thin veneer of regimen and civility, the already tenuous pylons of stoic British gentility in the face of adversity were eroding, buckling beneath their feet.  Offenses which would have earned a bout of invective-laden sarcasm and name-calling brought everyone to immediate wandpoint or the more indelicate art of fist-to-cuffs.  The balance of the fulcrum had only to shift.

     This room was a microcosm of what life had become outside these dank and suddenly comfortless walls.  Seamus was still hunched on his bench with his wand jutting from his fingers like a perversely misplaced codpiece, his eyes locked on an unruffled, unrepentant Malfoy, his lip curled to reveal a faint glint of white tooth, all because Malfoy had hurled an imprecation he had lobbed a thousand times before.  The venal sins were now cardinal, and the long-trusted leashes of complacency were fraying.

     Seamus' eyes caught her own across the classroom, and she understood the message in them as clearly as if he had spoken it aloud.  _Let me.  Give me a reason.  Just one nudge.  Just one._

     She could do it, too.  The power to incite unbridled bedlam lay within her cold, stiff hands.  All she had to do was set spark to brittle, crackling tinder.  Just reach out her hand.  She did not even have to inflict pain.  One finger would be enough.  One finger to watch the room explode.

     Her fingers tingled with a queer sexual anticipation, the nerves sending pleasant shivers into her wrist and elbow.  She flexed them inside the folds of her robes to quell the sensation, but it only intensified.  It was almost painful now, as though she had struck her funnybone on an invisible edge.  She fought the urge to growl with frustrated desire.  She wanted to watch it all come down, to see all the carefully hidden animosities come to light, to see their cultivated aplomb sloughed like dead and useless skin.  She wanted to see bared fangs and extended claws and the well-ordered charade turned on its smug head.

     It was the desk that stopped her.  Just before she lifted her hand to set the wheels of calamity in motion, her gaze drifted to the Professor's desk, somnolent, hulking, and agonizing in its emptiness, and she froze.  Her heart, which had thudded against her ribs with savage glee, rose into her throat and lodged there.  Quill.  Inkpot. Hourglass.  But no Professor Snape.

     She could see him in her mind's eye, tall and lean and pale as the moon as he loomed over her, the bottomless wells of his eyes glittering with silent rebuke.  She could almost hear the reproachful clip of his boots on the stone floor and the sussurating hiss of heavy wool as he folded his arms across his chest.  And then his voice, nightshade honey in her ears and carrying the doom of all worlds.

     This was his classroom, his place in the world, and if the authorities had their way, it would likely be all that remained of him.  She wanted to remember it as he had kept it-sparse, organized, and efficient-not reduced to splintered rubble by a fracas that would achieve nothing in the end.  If she could do nothing else for him, she could do this.

     _Fudge would consider turning this room to dusty rubble time well spent._

_     Fudge can go to hell, _she snarled, and shoved her trembling hand beneath her knee, trapping it there.

     The Headmaster glided into the room and stood before the Professor's desk with his hands clasped behind his back.  Behind her, Rebecca heard Draco turn on his heel and return to his seat.  From the corner of her eye, she saw Neville sag with relief and his hands release their white-knuckled grip on the sides of his desk.  Further down, Seamus wilted with a defeated scowl.

     The Headmaster beamed at them.  "Now that I trust all outstanding matters have been settled, let us begin.  According to Professor Snape's notes, you are currently learning the usage and proper brewing technique of a Strengthening Solution, are you not?"  He pushed his spectacles onto the bridge of his nose and raised an inquiring eyebrow.

     "Yes, sir," Rebecca answered.  Her voice was low and ragged.  The knowledge that the Headmaster was in possession of Professor Snape's notes had drained her of the temporary surge of vitality afforded from her squabble with Malfoy.  It made the situation real as real could be and drove home the fact that he was not expected to return for quite some time.  If at all.

     "Thank you, Miss Stanhope," the Headmaster replied, though his jovial smile faltered when he caught sight of her face.

     She managed a brave but fleeting smile and dropped her gaze to her lap.  She was too tired to pretend holding her head up wasn't an effort, and besides, she knew why he was looking at her like that.  How could she not?  As she looked, so she felt.  It had taken every ounce of her resolve and Winky's solicitous prodding to coax her from beneath the toasty, insulating warmth of her bed, and only the vivid memory of Fudge's sneering, vicious face as he had traipsed into the Potions Classroom bearing Professor Snape's ruin had gotten her to this point.  The pitiful physical reserves were all but gone.

     Her eyes were the worst.  She had seen them in the mirror this morning after dragging herself from the bathtub.  They were sunken, hollow, and bruised, feverish and red-rimmed from fitful sleep.  They throbbed inside her skull like curried marbles, and the normally thoughtless act of blinking was like taking a darning needle to her eyes.     They had looked so terrible that she had nearly acquiesced when Winky implored her to spend the day in the Hospital Wing rather than in lessons, but at the last moment, as Winky was leading her toward the fourth floor and the sepulchral coolness of the infirmary, she had imagined what Professor Snape would say if she skived class on account of her body, and without a word, she had turned and headed to the Great Hall and breakfast, leaving a crestfallen Winky in her wake.

     The Headmaster's gaze lingered on her a moment longer, and then he smiled and addressed the class again.  "It has been quite a few years since I've been in charge of a lesson, and I fear I am a trifle out of practice.  I do hope you will have patience with me," he said, his eyes twinkling behind his spectacles.

     "If we can have patience with that cranky old git, Snape, I'm sure there'll be patience enough for you, Headmaster," muttered Neville under his breath, and Rebecca wrangled with the urge to cuff him on the ear or tread upon his toes.

     The Headmaster, however, appeared not to have heard.  He reached into his robes and pulled out a roll of parchment, which he unfurled with careful grace.  He scanned the contents, rolled it up once more, and returned it to his robes.  "Happily, Professor Snape has always kept detailed lesson plans, so in a sense, we are still in his skilled hands," he said.  There were groans of consternation at this, but he continued.  "Please gather your ingredients and return to your seats.  When you've settled in again, I'll explain the individual ingredients and proper preparation.  Off you go."

     For a few seconds, no one moved.  This was not the way things were done.  Professor Snape lectured, _then_ snarled at them to collect the ingredients, and his rigid methodology was so ingrained in them that their brains refused to obey the Headmaster's command.  Then, one by one, like fieldmice popping from their burrows, they rose and headed for the storage cupboard.  Rebecca, dazed and inexplicably angry with this change from the established routine, started to follow suit, but the Headmaster came to stand in front of her desk.

     "Ah, Miss Stanhope.  Might I have a word?" he asked.

     "Of course, Headmaster," she answered, though she was in no mood to discuss her thoroughly wretched condition.  Another spasm gripped her, this one in her right hip, and she fought to keep her expression from betraying her discomfort.

     _If he asks me how I am, I'm going to scream.  I won't be able to stop myself.  I'll just sit here and howl until the roof caves in upon my head and ends this whole sorry mess._

To her surprise, he said nothing of the sort.  Instead, he leaned forward so that only she could hear him, and said, "I understand that Professor Snape has forbidden you to use magically modified equipment in your Potions work."

     She blinked.  "Erm, yes, sir."

     He stroked his beard thoughtfully.  "Does that bother you?"

     "It did, sir, but not anymore."

     His fingers paused in their travel.  "Oh?  Why is that?"

     "I see it as a challenge, sir."

     "Indeed.  And you think all challenges should be answered?"  He was looking at her with an unsettling expression of shrewd calculation, and she could not escape the feeling that he was testing her.

     She pondered the question for a moment, then shook her head.  "No, sir, not all.  Some are better left alone, but some you have to take, whether you want to or not.  If you don't, you can't go on."  _I should know, _she added silently.

     "And this is one of those challenges?"

     "Yes, sir."

     "I see, I see."  He straightened and clasped his hands behind his back.  "And if you could forego the challenge without anyone being the wiser?" 

     She stared at him, suddenly sure he wasn't referring to magically modified knives and calibrators anymore.  "I'm not sure I understand, sir."

     A sly smile flickered at the corners of his mouth.  "Oh, I think you do."

     _I'll be damned.  He knows.  I don't know how, but he does._

_     You said yourself that there wasn't much he didn't see, _her grandfather pointed out.

     _I know I did, but how?  _Where?_  The Room of Requirement?  I've never spoken of Professor Snape anywhere but there.  He isn't exactly the man of the hour in Gryffindor Tower._

     She racked her brain in a desperate attempt to recall every possible detail of the Room, every nook and shadowy corner.  Had there been anything unusual about it?

     _Besides the fact that the Potions classroom had moved eight floors?_

She snorted.  She doubted venerable Headmaster Dumbledore had been crouching in the dark or concealed in an Invisibility Cloak, so how had he done it?  Two-way mirror?  A Listening Charm?  That was possible, she knew.  She had seen Aurors setting them up in the Common Room last night.  Maybe the Headmaster had surveillance Charms of his own scattered around the castle.

     Her lurid imagination immediately conjured an image of Headmaster Dumbledore leering into a two-way mirror as he watched the girls in the Gryffindor lavatory.  Appalled, she shoved the thought away and resumed her preponderance of the matter at hand.  She knew very little about the Room of Requirement other than what Neville had told…

     Her eyes darted to Neville, who was still gathering his supplies, and who, she saw with a twinge of exasperated affection, was collecting hers as well.  Neville had been the one to bring her there.  Was it possible that he had known someone would be listening?

     _Climb down from the belltower.  Neville wasn't the one who didn't want to talk in the Common Room.  You're jumping at shadows.  Unless you're trying to tell me Neville Longbottom, who can barely pass his Divination homework, somehow knew you were fretting over his wholly unloved professor, and furthermore knowingly took you to a room the Headmaster uses for covert espionage against his pupils?  And even if I could force my mind to believe such nonsense, it would take a damn sight more work to convince me that boy could even remember a detail like that.  Barely remembers what he had for breakfast._

     She uttered a weary titter and scrubbed her burning eyes with the back of her hand.  Put that way, it _was_ ridiculous, even less probable than the contorted plots of a James Bond novel.  But it was within the realm of possibility that Neville had gone to the Headmaster and told him of her concerns, thinking that she had clearly and irrefutably gone around the bend.

     _That's right.  Never fear; Gryffindor might will save you from the clutches of evil Professor Snape, _she thought wryly, but as she watched Neville stretching for the last phial of scarab carapace, her anger slipped away, replaced by wistful tenderness and a terrible lethargy. 

     When she turned to face the Headmaster again, he was holding several instruments she recognized at once.  She had seen them all a thousand times in Professor Trask's clean, well-lighted classroom at D.A.I.M.S.  The magically calibrated beaker, the slip-proof cutting knife, and the self-stirring spoon.  Looking at them, she both longed for them and despised them, longed for them because they were a chance for her to lay down her unwanted burden, and despised them for the weakness they represented.

     "Are you certain, Miss Stanhope?  I have no objections," the Headmaster said gently, and she was again struck by the thought that he was not referring to her coursework.

     Her eyes darted from the Headmaster's patient gaze to the instruments in his proffered hands, then back again.  He was offering her an escape route, one last chance to choose a different path, and every fiber of her being screamed for her to seize it.  This was neither their battle nor their responsibility, and they were buckling beneath the crushing burden of it.  As if to remind her of the strain, her back spasmed painfully.

     And oh, how she wanted to heed their plea.  Everything hurt, from the soles of her withered feet to the crown of her head, and each movement she made was a testament to tenacious, teeth-grinding perseverance, and a practical, cold voice inside her head reminded her that it had only been two days.  If things were this bad now, what would they be like in seven days, or twenty, or sixty, or a hundred?  How long before she ground herself to dust beneath the wheel of an improbable cause?

     For fifteen years, she had thrived under the auspices of unflinching self-preservation.  Survival by any means necessary, even if it meant leaving the weak and the wounded.  March on, don't look back, and never let them see you weep.  Its brutality was matched only by its success.  Was she willing to turn away from it in the name of a man most of the world would not miss and would not remember?

     _If you don't speak for him now, who will speak for you when the time comes?_

     Her eyes traveled to the Professor's desk, lost and impotent without its master to shield it from the creeping darkness, and she gripped the arms of her chair and swallowed a lump in her throat.  Ignoring a plaintive warning from the bloodless, ruthless voice in the back of her mind, she tore her gaze from the abandoned desk and looked into the Headmaster's serene, expectant face.

     "Thank you, sir, but I can't-," her voice caught in her throat.  "I just can't."  She steeled her chin against a tremulous wobble.

     "Very well, then."  He dropped his hands, and the instruments disappeared from view, swallowed by voluminous folds of red silk.  "I trust everything is in order, then?"

     She doubted things had ever been in less order, but did see the use in pointing this out, so she said, "I suppose, sir."

     He straightened, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.  "I've no doubt you'll do splendidly," he said, and turned to resume his place in front of the class.  Then he paused and said, "Miss Stanhope?"

     "Yes, sir?"

     "Please see Professor Flitwick as soon as you can.  The next Quidditch match is in two weeks, and we wouldn't want any accidents upon the stairs.  The professor has been hard at work on some Charms you may find most useful."  With that, he flitted away.

     She stared after him, thoroughly confused.  What did Quidditch and Charms to keep her from breaking her neck on the rickety Quidditch pitch stairs have to do with the unspoken conversation between them?  Had her overworked, sleep-deprived brain read import into his words he had not intended?

     Before she could ponder the matter further, Neville returned and deposited her supplies onto the desk.  He sat down beside her with a smile.

     "Thanks," she said.

     "No worries," he said brightly, too brightly for her tastes, but before she could summon an acid retort, Dumbledore's voice silenced the low mutter of whispered conversation, and the lecture began.

     Albus Dumbledore's mind was not on the lecture he was giving.  It was on the sea of faces staring back at him and the man further down the corridor, imprisoned in his rooms like a mad cur.  As his lips moved and his voice waxed sonorous on the properties of Krup urine, his eyes wandered over the contours of each upturned, avid face, cataloguing each furrowed brow and hollowed cheek.  

     He wondered what secrets lay behind their watching faces, what they thought behind the closed curtains of their minds.  He knew he could find out if he wished, could peel back the layers until he found what he was looking for, but he could not bring himself to do it.  They trusted him with the blind faith only children and the simple could achieve, and to exploit that trust, even for the noblest of purposes, would be the ultimate betrayal.

     _What does that matter?  You've already betrayed Severus.  Why not them?_

His heart gave a painful lurch at the thought of Severus.  He had gone to see him last night, and what he had seen had broken his heart.  Fudge and his damned Ministry minions had destroyed everything, and Severus had been sitting in the middle of the wreckage as though Petrified.  Only the slow, drugged blink of his eyes had told him he was alive.

     Not that he wanted to be reminded of his eyes.  When he had picked his way through the scattered debris and knelt before the unmoving figure on the couch, there had been no sign of recognition, no sign of acknowledgement.  Those black eyes had been cold and dead as neglected embers; the burgeoning trust and hope he had nurtured for so long had been gone, and in its place was a gaping nothingness.  He had tried to think of something to say, some word of comfort, but in the end all he could do was sit back on his heels and take one lacerated hand in his own.

     Try as he might, he could get no explanation for his mangled, blood-encrusted hands.  He had not, in fact, managed to get a single syllable out of Severus.  Stony silence had greeted his every attempt at conversation, and he had healed his hands and cleaned up the devastation without a word.  When everything had been as tidy as he could make it, he had tried once more, only to be rebuffed by that barren, somnolent gaze.  

     It was only when he stood in the doorway, his head turned in one last good night, that something had stirred in Severus.  That pallid, inscrutable face had turned to face his own, and a pale, spidery hand had risen from his lap, the elegant fingers reaching up to graze the wrinkled, dirty collar of his robes.  For the briefest instant, the searing white-hot light of accusation had flared in his eyes and then it was gone, and he had resumed his contemplation of his stark, unadorned wall.  Not a word, but the message could not have been clearer.

     _You failed me.  I believed, and you failed me._

As though summoned by his thoughts, Severus' bleak, listless, loveless eyes materialized in his mind, and he fought the urge to close his eyes against them.  He deserved them, if truth be told.  He _had _failed Severus, just as he had Harry, still as stone and withering to nothingness in the Hospital Wing.  

     His eyes traveled to the empty seat where Harry should have been, and there was a vertiginous drop in the pit of his stomach.  If ever there were proof that he had bollixed things completely, the empty desk was it.  Its air of abandoned loneliness was magnified by the stalwart presence of Ron Weasley, who sat in the seat beside Harry's as if he were holding a silent, unnoticed vigil.  Maybe he was.

     _Merlin bless the Weasley loyalty.  If only _I_ had been so vigilant._

     _You've said that with alarming frequency in recent years._

     As his mouth rattled off impressive statistics concerning the composition and uses of Bowtruckle sap, his relentless mind catalogued his sins with merciless efficiency.  They paraded through his mind in a ceaseless stream, beginning with his failure to save James and Lily, continuing to his failure to recognize the impostor Moody for what he was and his blindness to Barty Crouch, Sr.'s aberrant behavior during the Tri-Wizard Tournament, and coming to a neat stop at the frozen body of Harry Potter.  All of them had ended in disaster or death, and he was not sure he could afford any of them.

     And there were others.  His roving eyes landed on the open, eager face of Neville Longbottom, so strong in spite of all the tragedy he had been dealt.  Life had not soured him.  Frank and Alice would have been so very proud had they not been tortured to irreparable insanity by Bellatrix Lestrange.  Yet their bodies lived out their remaining years tethered to the bland sterility of the closed ward of St. Mungo's, while their shattered minds tottered through an incomprehensible wasteland of jumbled, fractured memories disconnected from the very feelings that had made them.  Alice Longbottom had not spoken in fourteen years, and by all accounts, she inhabited a world where her beloved Neville, whom she and Frank had tried for four torturous years to conceive, was still an infant.  

     And the bitter irony of it was that their sacrifice had been in vain.  The information they had been trying to protect had come to nothing upon further investigation, though he would present himself to Voldemort before he told Neville so.

     His gaze drifted from Neville to Hermione Granger, who, for all her outward composure, was slowly going to pieces.  Her bushy hair was brittle and frayed, and her nails had been chewed to ragged, raw edges.  According to Madam Pince, she had spent every waking moment not passed in lessons or at Harry's bedside, poring over books in the library, huddled in a small corona of candlelight and searching for answers in the one place she had always been able to find them.

     Each face he looked upon had been marked by Harry's collapse in one fashion or another, even the Slytherins.  They were as uncommunicative and belligerent as ever, but now there was fear intermingled with their insouciant hauteur, fear and venomous vindication.  They were seeing a fraction of the power of the Ministry brought to bear, and they despised it even as they secretly lusted for it.  Fudge's ridiculous and inflammatory strong-arm tactics had served as the final proof that those in authority were aligned against them, and nothing he could say would convince them otherwise.  He need only look into young Draco Malfoy's eyes to see that.  He had lost them all at a single stroke.

     All his blunders had come home to roost, and he was trapped between them and uncertain of the way to turn.  If he chose the one, he lost the other, and if he chose the other, he could lose them both.  It was the ultimate conundrum, and he was powerless to solve it.

     He heard himself conclude the lecture and set the pupils to their task.  When every head had bowed over a cauldron, he sat behind Severus' desk, propped his elbows on its surface, and rested his chin on his interlaced fingers.  On the dimmest periphery of his vision, he saw Rebecca stiffen, her cutting knife paused over a bundle of fresh thyme.  She made a strangled, breathless noise in the back of her throat, and then the blade resumed its labored slicing.

_     You failed me._  

     He could not deny that.  He had failed Severus more often than he cared to admit.  This was just the latest in an abysmal series of shortcomings.  The first had been twenty-two years earlier, when the man who terrified first-years into stuttering incoherence had been a scrawny, underfed boy with graying underpants, underpants that had been shown to the student body for no other reason than malicious sport.  He had done nothing then, and a year later, when the same merry pranksters had nearly gotten him killed with their petty cruelty, he had stayed his hand again, and Minerva had let him, because they were her untouchable children.

     He often wondered if things would have turned out differently for all involved had he done as he ought and stepped in.  Would James have learned humility enough to spare him from his terrible fate?  Would Sirius have learned tolerance for the more reserved?  And what of Lupin?  He knew he should strip Remus of his Prefect's badge-those in authority should never allow such brutality to go unpunished, but he could not bring himself to do it.  Remus, unlike perfect, popular James, had been an outcast prior to his arrival, shunned for the mark of uninvited sin.  The Prefecture had been his first glory, and he had not wanted to wrest it away.

     _You wrested it from Severus easily enough._

     He took off his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose.  That he had, and the recollection of it filled his bones with lead.  Though he suspected he should hardly be surprised, given the fact that he had thought brutality should never go unpunished, and then promptly done just that.  Though he had always gotten it right with others, with Severus, he had always missed the mark.

     Of the five boys he had helped shape with his careless handling, he wondered about Severus the most.  How much harm had he truly done on those two fateful days?  More than enough.

     _You're hardly responsible for his actions.  _He _made the decision to join Voldemort.  _He_ made the choice to rape and kill and torture.  He is accountable, not you._

     Of course.  Every man chose his own path.  But each was also shaped by the forces around them, the perceptions they formed from the world beyond their eyes, and Severus had never seen power wielded responsibly.  His drunken, useless father had wielded it like an iron club, and Voldemort was even worse.  He as Headmaster should have shown him the way, but instead, he had fumbled it.  Now the Ministry was bludgeoning him with it, and he, Albus, knew there were no more second chances.  The die was cast.

     An image formed in his mind of Severus, twenty years old and drenched in blood, mucus and tears cutting swathes through the filth on his face.  Sundered from his grace, stiff and awkward as a woodcutting as he sat in a chair and wept, silent tears without end.  Severus, who had never trusted anyone, confessing his sins in a choked, horrified voice to the man experience told him he should have trusted least.  Then, later, when the dam had broken, sobbing like a small child while blood dried on his teeth.

     He was losing everything.  The school was in turmoil, the students simmering beneath the baleful, jaundiced eye of the Ministry; he could feel the tension in his teeth, a dull, constant tingle that made him want to scour the enamel with his tongue.  And Severus, Merlin help him, was all but gone.  He felt every one of his one hundred and fifty years and fifty more besides.  

     He should have known Fudge would be so brutal, so vindictively rash.  He was manic in his hatred of the Death Eaters and all they represented, not least of all the terrible possibility that Voldemort might yet live.  Voldemort was anathema, a bane Fudge and the rest of the wizarding world longed to forget, and when Severus had yanked up the sleeve of his robe and shown irrefutable proof that darkness had returned, he had committed the unpardonable sin.

     He should have gone with Fudge and the Aurors when they went to search Severus' chambers.  He could have been the voice of reason, brought a measure of sanity and decency to the proceedings.

     _Not likely.  The bloodlust is in Fudge now, and there is no reasoning with the mad.  Even if you had gone, there is nothing you could have done.  Incompetent and dangerous or not, he is still the Minister of Magic, and the terms of your life debt did not specify Severus' treatment.  All your pratings about fairness would have fallen on deaf ears._  

     He longed to throttle Fudge.  He resented being powerless in his own castle, forced to choose between what was right and what was best.  Because he would have to, if it came to it.  Much as he loved Severus, he could not allow Hogwarts to fall into the wrong hands.  It was too strategically important in the fight against Voldemort, and if it fell to Fudge, all would be lost.  One for a thousand, and Severus was expendable.

     He grimaced in self-recrimination.  He hated what war made him, and he had been forced into this unbearable role far too often in his life.  Doling out worth like currency, deciding who among them was fit to live and who could be sacrificed as fodder for the inexorable machinery of war.  More than once, he had chosen the members to be sent on highly dangerous Order missions by writing their names on a piece of parchment and listing the consequences of their loss.  He totaled up the value of their life like a morbid accountant, and whoever numbered least was dispatched to the killing field.  It was reprehensible.

     It was the way of war.

     His eyes landed on Rebecca, hunched over her cauldron, sweat dripping onto the tip of her nose.  Her hand was trembling with concentration as she willed her frail fingers into miserable acquiescence.  It was obvious even from where he sat that her decoction was too thick and nearly burnt, but still she toiled, beating the ragweed seeds into submission.  Her eyes blazed with implacable ferocity as she worked, pounding the seeds into a fine powder with her pestle.

     Minerva was worried about her, and as he watched, he could see why.  Her hair had lost its inexplicable fire and hung around her wan face like hanks of brittle straw.  Her eyes were bruised and puffy from too little sleep, as though she battled dark dreams, and her skin was pastier than ever.  Rounded shoulders drawn protectively around her scrawny neck, she prodded the tip of her wand to the base of her cauldron, which had begun to belch acrid purple smoke.  She waved away the fumes and returned to her mortar and pestle.

     He watched, fascinated.  Her behavior had been very odd as of late.  She moved with exaggerated care, as though expecting her beleaguered joints to crumble at any moment, and when she spoke her shrewd, measured voice was now slurred and clumsy in her mouth.  Minerva was convinced that the strain of Ministry meddling had proven too much for her, but he wasn't sure.  Yes, she looked absolutely wretched, but she exuded a quiet, relentless determination.  It was in the set of her jaw and the unyielding line of her neck.  She was watching.  Waiting.

     _Why is she still grinding?  The potion is unsalvageable._

Her eyes flicked to the Professor's desk, and her jaw tightened with an audible creak, and in that moment, he understood.  

     _She is doing it because that is what Severus expects of her.  No other reason than that.  _

     _You may not be able to do anything for Severus, but she can.  Or at least try.  They don't notice her.  She's made certain of that.  Hiding in plain sight._

     He smiled, the first genuine smile to grace his countenance since the Ministry had darkened his doorstep.  She was made of sterner stuff than he had realized, too young to truly understand the magnitude of the risk she took, and blessed in her ignorance.  She was a mongoose among cobras, undaunted by the poisoned fang and armed with steel jaws of her own.  What she lacked in experience, she made up for in unadulterated brass.

     _Merlin bless her Gryffindor bravado and Slytherin sleight of hand._

_     Let's hope in works.  Her experience may be her undoing._

Ah, but experience was the one thing he had in spades.  One hundred and fifty years' worth.  He might not be able to help Severus, but he _could_ help her.  Fudge could hardly begrudge him for nurturing a pupil's desire to learn.  In fact, it was his job as Headmaster.

     When the lesson ended, he watched her leave.  She trailed Neville and Seamus and rolled her neck to ease the tension there.  She turned in the doorway and looked at the Professor's desk again, and her eyes hardened with resolve and unspoken fury.  Her pasty fist clenched around her control stick, and when her eyes met his, he knew beyond doubt that she would see it to whatever end.  Then she turned and followed her friends.

     _You certainly have the will, Miss Stanhope.  Now let us see if you have the skill._

     When she was out of sight, he left and locked the door behind him.  It was time to stop wallowing in ineffectual self-pity and see if a young mongoose and an old fox could band together to save a viper that meant the world to both of them.  He whistled as he walked, on his way to speak with Kingsley Shacklebolt, and the sound reverberated in the perpetual gloom of the dungeons, hope amid the despair.  The phoenix had taken flight.     


	35. Frog and Mongoose: The Liars' Cotillion...

Chapter Thirty-Five

     Later that night, Rebecca sat in the Common Room with Seamus and Neville, watching the Aurors dismantle everything.  They rooted through the carrels and thumbed through the textbooks.  The sofa cushions were deposed and tossed onto the hearthrug.  A chubby, sandy-haired Auror was pawing student rucksacks.  The entire process was silent and serene.  There was no urgency, no overt malice, only coldly efficient order.

     Seamus looked up at a thump from overhead.  A small cadre of Aurors was busily ransacking the dormitories, and from the sound of it, they were going about the task with far more gusto than their downstairs counterparts.

     "The whole place will be a ruddy mess by the time they're through," he muttered out one side of his mouth.

     "I don't doubt that," agreed Neville, his fat toad clutched in both hands.  "Can't be as bad as the Slytherins got, though.  I heard they reduced the whole Slytherin Common Room to kindling.  Took the upper years hours to repair all the damage."

     "Why am I not surprised?" Rebecca said wryly.

     "If there is any House that deserves it, it's the Slytherins."  Seamus sidled from foot to foot and watched the chubby Auror dump his rucksack onto the floor and examine the contents.

     Rebecca looked at him without expression.  "Why?"

     Seamus snorted.  "Because I've never met a bunch of greasier wankers, prats, and arseholes," he said bluntly.

     She grunted.  She was too tired to argue, and besides, there wasn't much she could say to that.  Her experiences with the denizens of Slytherin had been less than amenable.  Draco went out of his way to insult her whenever they crossed paths, and Pansy Parkinson, the shrill, pug-nosed debutante of Slytherin girls, had more than once called derisive attention to her increasingly ragged appearance.  Even Professor Snape, whom she respected, treated her with disdainful tolerance and little more.

     "Well, with a great git like Snape at the helm, what more can you expect?" chimed in Dennis Creevey, hunched in a tattered, overstuffed chair with his knees drawn to his chest.

     "Professor Snape," she murmured absently.

     "What?"  Seamus and Neville blinked at her, and Creevey surveyed her in mild surprise.

     "It's Professor Snape," she said, careful to slur her words lest prying ears were listening.  Her eyes darted to the corner where she had seen Aurors installing Listening Charms.

     "Not anymore, he isn't," said the chubby Auror in a merry, singsong voice that made Rebecca's chilled flesh crawl.  "Stripped of everything, he was.  His Professorship, his Head of Houseship, all gone.  Just desserts for what he's done."  He wore a dreamy expression as he reached for the next bag.

     She stared at him, her teeth grinding uselessly in her mouth.  She didn't trust herself to speak.  She curled her hands around the armrests of her chair to keep them from wrapping around his bloated neck.  Blood roared in her temples.  The acid churned in her empty, aching stomach, and greasy bile rose in her throat.

     _Feel nothing,_ she told herself, _swaddle yourself in the anesthetizing comfort of pure hatred.  Righteous anger and compassion are weakness now.  You can't let them see what lies beneath.  They'll use it against you.  Survive anyway you can._

She forced her hands to relax, and conjured a vague, unfocused smile, which she flashed at the loose-lipped Auror.  "Oh.  I didn't know that.  Guess what he did was pretty awful, huh?"

     The Auror paused in his perusal of a schoolbag, his brow knitted in consternation, and then his eyes drifted to the slender, sturdy bulk of her chair, and relieved comprehension flooded his pudgy, shiny face.

     _Bastard._  But she stretched the gormless smile wider still.  This was exactly what she needed if she were going to have a chance.  She had to thrive on that which she despised-their ignorance and inveterate bias.  

     He gave her an indulgent smile.  "You don't know the half of it, young miss," he said gaily, and his barrel chest swelled with perverse pride.  "We gave him what for.  He didn't look so superior after we was through with him."

     She composed her face into what she prayed was an expression of avid, morbid interest.  "Really?  What did you do to him?"

     He leaned forward and said in a conspiratorial whisper, "You know those daft and lordly robes of his?  The ones that make him look all poncy like?"

     Rebecca frowned.  She didn't think Professor Snape's robes made him look poncy in the slightest.  Truth be told, she wasn't sure what that word meant, though, judging from his tone, she suspected it was not intended as a compliment.  Whatever its denotation, she thought the Professor's robes imbued him with a dark, magisterial beauty.  But she merely nodded and waited for him to continue.

     "Well," he confided gleefully, "we tore them straight off.  Not so proud then, was he?" 

     "That's enough," said a tweedy Auror who was replacing the sofa cushions.

     "Oh, erm, right, sir."  He bent to his work again.  "Off you go, miss." 

     She managed a nod, but it was a horrible parody, the frozen, graceless jerk of a re-animated corpse.  Her teeth were locked together, and try as she might, she could not force them open.  The ability to move had been smothered by the lurid image of Professor Snape's elegant, billowing robes being ripped from his body and cast aside like offal.  Flickering candlelight on chapped white skin and black eyes glittering with humiliation.

     _What have you done? _she wanted to scream, but the cry was lodged in her throat like sour gristle.

     _Feel nothing.  Nothing.  Lose yourself in the hatred.  It's safe there.  You've done it before; do it now._

"Rebecca?"  A soft Irish brogue, tinny and distant, as though muffled by dense fog.

     "I think I'd like to play Exploding Snap," she said.  "Yes."  Anything to distract her from the tidal wave of wormwood loathing scalding her stomach.

     "All right," said Neville a trifle too enthusiastically, and he scurried over to arrange one of the Common Room tables so that she could pull up to it.

     She backed away from the Auror, watching him all the while, and as the distance between them grew, so did her anger.  It stood every detail of the fat Auror's face in exquisite detail, and she memorized it.  From the oily droplets of sweat on his cheeks to the delicate quiver of his jowls as he moved.  She imagined him laughing at Professor Snape's exposed vulnerability, those beefy jowls jiggling like molded gelatin, and for a split second, she saw herself laughing at Judith Pruitt as she sat covered in her own shit.  

     _That's what Judith saw when she looked at me._

     The thought was so bald that her jaw sagged in a boneless gape, and she swiped the back of a trembling hand over her mouth.  Her stomach heaved, and for one wild moment, she was sure she was going to be sick.  She didn't dare put her head between her knees, for fear that it would attract a gaggle of concerned and curious Aurors.  She closed her eyes, counted to ten, and waited for her seesawing equilibrium to stabilize.

     The idea that someone could view her with such hatred-and have every reason to do so-knocked her precarious emotional underpinnings from beneath her in one clean sweep.  Until this moment, staring into the face of her unsuspecting nemesis, she had always consoled herself with the comforting belief that, wrong as it may have felt, what they had done to Judith was right, that she had brought it upon herself with her weakness and her fear and her nauseating self-pity.  

     It was better this way, they had told themselves as they watched the grinning jackals in young-girl faces tear her apart.  They even told themselves that it was a mercy.  After all, Judith was weak, and, worse yet, aware of her helplessness.  Why else would she weep and cower when they came for her; why else did she offer no defense against their malicious laughter and cutting tongues?  Because she had known that it was what she deserved.

     Now, on the other side of the unflinching looking glass, she finally understood, and the fact that the epiphany had come too late tasted of despair and wormwood on her tongue.  Judith had surrendered, not because she was weak and spineless, but because there had been no choice.  They had worn her down through unending attrition, bloodletting by claw and tooth, and no matter how hard she struggled, the end result was the same.  The walls had closed in, and everywhere she looked, she had seen only dull, disinterested faces.  When she had reached out in a last desperate bid for help, they had all taken a single step backward and watched the fatal blow come down.

     _No help.  There was no help for her.  _

     History was repeating itself.  The jackals and carrion fowl were circling the wounded cobra, and they would carry him off if they could, just as they had taken Judith in the end.  And there was no help for him, not here, in the dispassionate faces of her friends and Housemates.  They viewed him as an onus, a weakness and blight with which to be dispensed.  _Things will be better without him, _theytold themselves, and troubled themselves no more.

     She who had once done nothing was now charged with the impossible task of doing everything, and the staggering mantle of isolation Judith had worn for so long was now hers.  She felt impossibly small, and she was seized with fury at the oblivious Auror for making her see that which she did not wish to see.  Had it not been for him or for Umbridge with her bloated, smirking face, or for Harry, lying still and cold in the Hospital Wing, she never would have come to this.

     Her fingers twitched with the desire to hex him, to pull her wand from her robes and utter the words that would divest him cruelly and permanently of his smug surety and render him as lost and confused as her.  She wanted to knock him from his perch and sneer into his upturned, terrified, blubbering face that _he_ did not look so lordly now.  But she knew it for folly, and so she held her tongue, and her wand remained tucked inside her robes.  She would hold the delicious fantasy of the Auror writhing at her feet close to her heart until the end, and until then she would savor it like the finest wine.

     Beneath her anger was a tiny, shimmering kernel of relief at the knowledge that all was not lost, that the long road to Damascus was not barred against her.  It was too late for Judith, but it was not too late for her.  She could atone for one wrong by righting another, and even if the grim, gaunt specter of Judith never forgave her, maybe at the end of all of this she could forgive herself.

     "Rebecca?" Neville called from behind her, and she jumped.

     "Sorry," she said slowly, careful to slur her words, "I was thinking."  

     She pivoted her chair toward the table, certain she had heard a sly snigger from one of the Aurors clustered around the sofa.  Neville had already set up the cards, and Seamus was examining his with furtive concentration.  She rolled into the slot made for her by Neville and turned off her chair.

     "We playing for anything other than shits and giggles?" she asked, and cracked her knuckles.

     Seamus roared with laughter.  "No lady, you," he snorted.  "But no, we're not playing for anything but bragging rights."

     "I guess untold riches will have to wait for another day," she sighed.

     Seamus stopped thumbing through his cards and made a great show of investigating the pockets of his robes.  "My riches consist of a moldy Bertie Botts Every-Flavor Bean, a ball of lint, and two Knuts," he announced.  "What about you, Neville?"

     Neville plunged his hand into the pocket of his robes and withdrew it a moment later.  He opened it to reveal a wad of tissue, a half-melted chocolate frog, a Galleon, and four crinkled gum wrappers.  He hastily closed his fingers and shoved the contents of his hand back into his pocket.

     "What are earth are you keeping all of that for?" Seamus asked.  "Chuck the rubbish into the fire."

     Neville shook his head, blushing furiously.  "Er, no.  I'll do it later," he insisted, and Rebecca noticed that his hands were fisted on the tabletop.

     Seamus eyed him in quiet speculation for a moment, then decided not to press the issue, for which she was glad.  She had the feeling that he had inadvertently blundered into something to which they were not meant to be privy.

     "Suit yourself," Seamus said amiably.  "It's your go."

     Soon the game developed a rhythm of sporadic chatter and the snap of playing cards, and the anger that had permeated her mind like senses-dulling smog drifted away, supplanted by detached observation.  She watched those around her as they drifted in and out of her field of vision.  Parvati flitted around the Common Room and whinged to anyone who would listen that a careless, slip-fingered Auror had broken her "crystal orb" as she called it, and then had the audacity not to render an apology forthwith.  On the opposite side of the room, the twins and Lee Jordan were huddled in whispered, urgent conference.

     Ron was sprawled in front of the fireplace with a Transfigurations book beneath his nose, but she knew without looking that his mind was a million miles away, perched in a hard, comfortless chair in the Hospital Wing.  He would have visited Potter tonight if he could have, but the searching Aurors had forbidden anyone to leave, as if they feared that an escaping Gryffindor would carry away potentially damning evidence.  Which was ridiculous.  Ron Weasley would have brought them the proverbial smoking gun wrapped in golden paper were it within his power to do so.

     A few feet away, Hermione was poring over books on poisons and their antidotes that she had taken from the library, scribbling notes on a sheaf of parchment.  She was as bent on saving Harry as Rebecca was on rescuing Professor Snape, and the strained terror on her face reflected the gnawing fear in Rebecca's bones.  Hermione's eyes were puffy from lack of sleep, and her bushy hair was dull and brittle on her scalp.  She had chewed her fingernails to pieces, and her fingertips were raw and frequently bloody from the unceasing assault of her teeth.

     Much as she found Granger to be a shrill, overbearing idealist, she could not help but feel a pang of reluctant empathy.  They were both scrabbling in the dark for the keys to the mystery that had swept them all away, searching in the places they knew best.  Granger turned to her books, and she to her instinct and her hatred and her watchful, inexorable patience.  They were working toward the same goal, though Granger would never see it that way.  No, if she knew what Rebecca was doing and thinking, she would graduate from house elf-torturing ghoul to twisted, deluded menace in the Granger lexicon in no time flat.  Their kinship would have to remain unspoken.

     She snorted and wrestled a six of diamonds from her hand of cards.  She tossed it onto the untidy pile of rejected cards in front of her and picked up the three of spades that Neville had just discarded.  Beside her, Seamus chewed his lower lip and exhaled through his nose.  His fingers hesitated first over one card, then another.  Finally, they drifted to the first and plucked it from the fan of cards.  He threw it down and drew another from the deck.

     "Dammit," he muttered when he saw what he had drawn.  

     She gave a commiserating cluck and let her eyes wander again.  They fell on the pudgy Auror once more.  He was almost done now.  She still hated him; her lip still longed to curl at the sight of his florid, pouchy, sweaty face, and her tongue curled and twitched like the tail of an impatient cat with the need to curse him, but free of the impetuous reign of anger, she could see how he could be _useful._  He was short on brains and long on lip, and if she were careful, she might be able to turn it to her advantage.

     _Now you're thinking like a Stanhope_.  Her grandfather sounded pleased.

     _No.  I'm thinking like you.  The Stanhopes don't have enough brains between them to power a light bulb._

_     No, but they're good people all the same.  They know how to keep their mouths shut and their eyes open.  Something to be said for that.  Saved you more than once._

     She had just thrown down a nine of clubs when the portrait swung open and Auror Dawlish and Madam Toad arrived.  Dawlish, as was his custom, was absolutely inscrutable, eyes lifeless as brown pebbles beneath his thick, graying eyebrows.  He carried his wand at his side, and he scanned the room constantly, as though he expected to be set upon by a mob of angry Gryffindors at any moment.  But none of them moved.

     Umbridge stepped forward, clipboard in hand.  "Miss Stanhope, dear?" she said, a false honeysuckle smile stretching her lips.

     "Yes, ma'am?"  Rebecca put down her cards.  She knew why she was here.  It was here turn to stand before the Inquisition.

     Umbridge rested her stubby, splay-fingered hand on her shoulder, and she fought the urge to shake it off.  "Would you come with me, please?  "I've some questions to ask you."

     _I'll just bet you do.  _"Of course, ma'am," she said, her voice tremulous and thick as syrup in her mouth.  

     She pulled away from the table and from Seamus and Neville, who were watching her in mystified bewilderment, and she took special care to ram into a chair, the legs of a passing Auror, and the skinny shanks of a first-year sitting on the floor behind her as she made an unnecessarily wide three-point turn.

     "Sorry," she mumbled to the unfortunate first-year, who was glaring at her and rubbing his wounded buttocks.  She hid a smile of triumph behind the blonde curtain of her hair when she saw a look of dismayed consternation pass from Umbridge to Dawlish.  The stupider they thought she was, the better.

     "Erm, yes, well…let's go over here, shall we?"  Umbridge gestured to a cluster of empty chairs hunkered disconsolately in a gloomy corner of the Common Room.

     "Yes, ma'am," Rebecca said, and followed dutifully.  

     Umbridge, she noted, was careful to keep the heels of her clunky, square-toed shoes at least two inches in front of her front wheel, as though she feared she would speed up and clip her from behind.  Tempting as the thought was, she kept rolling at a jerky, lumbering pace, and all the while, she kept the image of the writhing Auror fixed in her mind.

     "Well now, here we are," Umbridge said unnecessarily, and stopped in front of one of the overstuffed orange chairs.

     Rebecca gave a gormless titter.  It seemed expected of her.

     Umbridge sat down.  "Three chairs for three…," she trailed off.  "But then, I forgot.  You've brought your own.  How handy."  She laughed in appreciation of her own wit.

     Rebecca mustered another dim-witted grunt of amusement, though she longed to slap the self-congratulatory smirk from Umbridge's face.  Even Dawlish, who did not strike her as the most politic or compassionate of souls, was eyeing his superior with discomfited disbelief.  Not that he would actually speak up.  For him, the display of disapproval was enough.

     _The fat Auror writhing and screaming, wallowing in his own piss.  Hold that thought.  Hold it tight.  Don't let go, or everything is lost._

     "Now then, dear, may I see your wand?"  Umbridge held out her hand.

     Rebecca bobbed her head in drunken approximationof a nod.  "Yes, ma'am."

     "Er, dear," said Umbridge suddenly, "are your hands clean?"

     Rebecca clamped the inside of her cheek between her teeth and struggled to maintain a countenance of logy befuddlement.  _Remember that, do you?_

     "I think so," she said dreamily, and held out her hands, stiff and chapped from the cold.

     Umbridge leaned forward to inspect them.  "Your nail beds are blue," she observed.

     "Yes, ma'am.  Blood doesn't circulate so well in the cold."

     "Ah."  There was an awkward silence while Rebecca continued to hold out her hands.  Finally, Umbridge said, "Well, get out your wand.  I'm a busy woman."

     Rebecca took a long time wrangling her wand from her robes.  She let it slip through her fumbling fingers half a dozen times before she seized it, and even after the reassuring heft of the wood pressed into her palm, she hunched, red-faced and panting and seized with a suicidal urge to cackle, over her knees and watched them from behind the fortuitous fall of her hair.  Only the tantalizing image of the Auror convulsing in the grip of wicked retribution kept her from hooting in sardonic glee.

     Umbridge was watching her in mortified silence, her squat, blocky hands clutching her toadstool knees, the gaudily bejeweled fingers digging into the fabric of her robes like diseased roots seeking wet darkness.  Her lips were puckered in an expression of frozen revulsion, and her eyes tracked her every tortured movement with avid fascination.

     _Don't like me much, do you, Madam Toad?  Well, the feeling is entirely mutual.  _She jiggled her wand ineffectually inside the pocket of her robes, though she could have brought it out at any time.  Umbridge shifted in her seat, and Rebecca could see impatience warring with rapidly crumbling professional civility.  She could almost see Umbridge's poison tongue twitching behind her teeth.

     _Come on, come on, say it, you miserable old bitch, _Rebecca pleaded, but the old bag held her silence, and so she continued her deliberate struggle.  She would keep it up for as long as it took for that sculpted mask of maternal sweetness to slip again, just as it had in the Great Hall.  Whatever it took to throw her off balance.

     Dawlish, seated to Umbridge's left, was watching her as well, his eyebrows knitted in curious concentration.  His wand rested on his knees, cupped beneath one rough, tanned hand.  The other twitched restlessly on the arm of his chair.  

     Rebecca dipped her head to hide another smile.  _He wants to help, to end this, but he doesn't quite dare.  Just a little more, I think._  Sure enough, Dawlish's eyes darted to Umbridge, and she saw the question in them as surely as though he had voiced it.

     _Do I help her?_

Rebecca redoubled her "efforts" to extricate her wand, jabbing its tip ponderously against the lip of the pocket.  She pushed hard enough to coax an ominous purr from the seam, and from the corner of her eye, she saw Umbridge wince.  Dawlish's feet tapped nervously against the floor.

     _I can do this all night._

     "Do you need help, dear?" asked Umbridge sweetly.

     Rebecca shook her head.  "Oh, no, ma'am," she cried jovially.  "The pursuit of the goal is half the fun."

     "Indeed," Umbridge muttered, though she sounded anything but agreeable.

     Rebecca fell to it again with renewed gusto.  If she had to go much longer, she was going to give in to the riotous laughter twining its fingers around her throat with slow, insistent pressure.

     _They think I'm crazy as a loon._

Nor, she suspected, were they the only ones.  Her antics had come to the attention of most of the Common Room, and most eyes were trained on her as she continued to fumble and blunder in her pockets.  Even the Aurors were watching, abandoning their perfunctory searches of drawers and students in favor of the bizarre spectacle unfolding before them.  The Auror who had so effortlessly become her icon against foolish missteps gaped at her, a riffled schoolbag drooping dispiritedly between his fingers.

     At their table, Seamus and Neville were transfixed, the card game they had continued in her absence forgotten.  Seamus had pulled one of the cards from the deck and was bending it double in his palm.  Neville had pushed his chair away from the table and scooted to the edge of his seat, preparing, no doubt, to come to her rescue.

     _Oh, Neville, I love you, but please, please don't get up.  It would be the worst thing you could do.  This is a dance meant only for two.  _

Umbridge coughed and made a strange noise in the back of her throat, a prissy, irksome, hiccoughing chirp that reminded her of angry squirrel.  Across the room, she saw the soles of Neville's trainers plant against the floor, saw his body stiffen and unfurl as he got ready to stand.  She closed her eyes and felt her heartbeat thud against her ribs in a desperate, painful rhythm.

     _Please, God, let Umbridge break before Neville stands.  Please.  She has to.  Please.  She has-_

     "Oh, for Merlin's sake!" Umbridge snapped.  "Dawlish, get the girl's wand."

     Rebecca fought to quash a jubilant yell.

     "Yes, ma'am," Dawlish said, and sprang from his seat.  "Let me help you, miss."  He reached out and brushed her hand aside.

     The instant he touched her, she let out an agonized yell and recoiled, clutching her hand as though he had crushed it in the grip of fiery fingers.  Startled, Dawlish stumbled backwards in chagrined panic.  His heel clipped the bottom of the chair in which he had been sitting, and he tumbled into it with an ungainly flop.  His wand flew from his hand and struck the side of Umbridge's face with an authoritative smack.

     Umbridge clapped a hand to the side of her face and stared at Dawlish in mute outrage.  "What in the name of Persephone are you _doing_, you twit?" she seethed, her eyes blazing with fury.

     Dawlish, sprawled in his chair, blinked owlishly at her and cast longing glances at his wand, which had slipped onto her lap.  "I don't know.  I just touched her, and she started howling fit to burst."  

     The plaintive perplexity in his voice and stamped onto his formerly stoic face undid Rebecca, and an exhilarated guffaw escaped her.  Thankfully, it sounded like piteous weeping, an impression enhanced by the fact that she had doubled over and buried her scarlet face between her knees.

     The sound diverted Umbridge's attention from the hapless Dawlish, who was still trying to recover his tattered dignity and his wand from the front of Umbridge's robes.

     "What is the matter with you, you stupid, clumsy girl?" Umbridge spat, chest heaving.  Then, as it slowly dawned on her that the entire Common Room was watching, she hitched a solicitous smile onto her face and patted her hair in an attempt to smooth stray locks into place.  "Oh," she said, "what I mean, dear, is are you all right?"

     Another howl of perverse amusement nearly escaped her.  _Oh, yes, I'm sure that's just what you meant.  Your mask is lopsided._

_     Yours will be, too, if you don't get a grip on yourself, _her grandfather chided.  _This is too important for childish hysteria.  If you still think it's funny, you just remember your Potions Master stripped naked as the day he was born and put on display for a bunch of gawking government officials._

That sobered her, and she sat up and wiped her streaming eyes.  "Hmm?"

     "Are you all right, dear?" Umbridge repeated, with emphasis on every word, as though she were speaking to a retarded child.

     She opened her mouth to answer, but before she could, a shrill voice interrupted.

     "Is you all right, miss?"

     Winky was standing on the bottommost stair to the dormitories, small leathery hands wringing and twining like restless serpents.  Her eyes were huge inside her tiny face.  She looked from Rebecca to Umbridge and back again.  One foot hung above the riser, suspended in mid-step.

     "Yes, Winky, I'm fine," she soothed.  "Just an accident."

     The elf looked dubious.  "You is sure?"  Her hands came up to tug her ears.

     "Absolutely.  Go on upstairs.  I'll be up as soon as I finish my chat with Madam Umbridge and Mr. Dawlish.  I'm awfully tired."

     Winky nodded.  "Yes, you is looking dreadful, miss.  I is going to get the bed ready."  With a last reproachful look at Umbridge and Dawlish, she darted up the stairs again.

     "Now then, where were we?" Umbridge muttered impatiently when Winky was gone.  "Ah, yes, your hand.  Let me see it, dear."

     Rebecca shook her head and pulled it tight against her stomach.  "It will be fine, ma'am."

     "I insist."  There was a hint of steel in Umbridge's voice now.  She held out her hand.

     Rebecca shook her head again and shrank into her chair, her shoulders hunched against invisible threat.  "No, ma'am.  My skin is hypersensitive to touch.  Handling it may make things worse," she lied, and did her best to look forthright and unsettled all at once.

     Umbridge looked as if she were going to pursue the subject, then said abruptly, "Your wand, please."

     This time, Rebecca fished it from her pocket with a minimum of struggle and handed it over, thankful for the gloom that concealed the distinct lack of either bruise or weal on her flesh.  Dawlish withdrew parchment and quill from his robes and settled himself into his chair, eyes wary and strained.

     "State your name for the record, please," ordered Umbridge, and every trace of motherly affection had vanished.  It was cold and commanding, the voice of a veteran interrogator.

     _I'm going to have to be very careful with you, aren't I?  You make look like a bumbling, matronly yeoman just trying to do your job, but there's a whole lot more happening behind those bulging eyes of yours than you let on.  Arbeit und Ordnung, that's you.  Jackboots and black wool would suit you well, I think.  _

_     I think a retreat to the fortress is in order, _offered her grandfather.

     _Yes, I think so.  I've played this game a thousand times before with headshrinkers and doctors and pundits of the pill and scalpel.  I understand the game of mental chess and all the voodoo that goes with it.  So we'll play again, and I'm pretty sure my fortress will outlast yours._

     So she retreated behind the walls she thought she had forsaken and barricaded the doors.  The color faded from her world and the warmth from her bones, until all that remained was scoured slate and the surety of observation unfettered by vested interest.  The shimmering haze of exhausted hatred fell away to reveal everything with hellish, clinical clarity.  She could see the minute cracks in Umbridge's appalling fuchsia lipstick, tiny fissures that mirrored the age lines spreading across Dawlish's face.  They were fading statues crumbling beneath the weight of time.  

     "Rebecca Stanhope."  Slur on the "s", and a slight wobble of the head.

     "And this is your wand?"  Umbridge held it up.

     "Yes, ma'am."

     Umbridge pressed to tip of Rebecca's wand to her own and muttered, "_Priori incantatem!"_

     Rebecca watched dispassionately while the Charms that guided her through the gauntlet of stairs and narrow doors and unreachable library books streamed from her wand in a gossamer, undulating thread-_Automus Wingardium leviosa, Reducto, Finite incantatem, Accio book, Accio parchment, Augeo fortis, Evanesco, Desaperecium, Scourgify._  One by one, they served as indelible minutes of her march through life.  Dawlish marked them all down on his parchment while Umbridge watched with growing boredom.

     When the ghosts of incantations past had continued in the same soporific pattern for several minutes, Umbridge tapped wand tips again and said, "_Finite incantatem._  The wispy golden stream stopped.  Another tap.  _"Priori cursus!"_

     The ephemeral, wavering images of ever place to which her rolling wheels had carried her since the arrival of the Ministry passed beneath Umbridge's prying, greedy gaze, the illusive topography of where she had been and where her rounded rubber feet would carry her again.  Classrooms and bedrooms and bathrooms, oh my.  _My Life as a Hogwarts Student_, by Rebecca Stanhope.

     She watched and blinked and said nothing.  There was nothing for them to find.  She had not trod on forbidden ground, skulked in dusty secret passageways.  She had gone from lesson to lesson and classroom to classroom as reliably as if her wheels had been bound to the path.  Only her mind had strayed from its appointed places, and that, thank God, was beyond the reach of Umbridge's scrutinizing wand.  At least with that spell.  If thought were as deadly as deed, the bodies of the Aurors would already teeter toward the heavens.

     Umbridge's investigation of her daily treks yielded much the same as her inspection of prior spells, and when it became evident that no startling revelation would be forthcoming, she ended the spell and returned Rebecca's wand with a sniff of disappointment.

     "You were in Potions the day Harry Potter collapsed?"  It was not a question.

     "Yes, ma'am."  Nothing else.

     Umbridge waited for her to continue, but she merely plucked at a loose thread on the sleeve of her robe and counted off the seconds as they spun into the expectant silence.  She would give them nothing through haste.  Dawlish shifted in his chair and drummed the end of his quill against the back of his hand.  Umbridge raised an inquiring eyebrow at her.  Rebecca offered her an insipid smile.

     "Well?" Umbridge prompted, and folded her plump hands over her knee.

     _I've been through Professor Snape.  You're going to have to do better than that.  _"Well what, ma'am?"  That empty, sunny smile again.

     Umbridge's nostrils flared, and she wrenched a coaxing smile onto her face.  "What happened in class that day?"

     _One potato, two potato, three potato, four.  See the Auror a-writhing on the floor.  Tell you a secret, and you won't get any more._

"We were supposed to be testing Harry's Advanced Sleeping Draught, but something went wrong."  She scratched the bridge of her nose and gazed at her interrogators as though she had revealed a great secret.

     The vein in Umbridge's temple throbbed dangerously.  "We _know _that, dear.  What we need to know is if you saw anything unusual that day."

     _Five potato, six potato, seven potato, eight.  Only as strong as the strength of my hate.  Beg me a secret, and you'll be made to wait._

She pretended to consider the question, cocking her head to one side and reaching up a hand to massage the back of her neck.  "Well, Colin Creevey came in with a note from Professor McGonagall just before it happened," she offered.

     Umbridge and Dawlish leaned forward in their chairs, their eyes alight with sudden interest.  The latter was pressing the tip of his quill to the parchment so hard that it was in danger of snapping.

     "And what did the note say?" Umbridge demanded.

     _One potato, two potato, three potato, four.  See the Auror a-writhing on the floor._

Rebecca shrugged.  "I don't know, ma'am; I didn't see."

     Umbridge wilted with disappointment and sagged into her chair, and behind the walls of her fortress, Rebecca smiled.  Her face, however, remained impassive, and she eyed the plump woman across from her with heavy-lidded disinterest.

     "How did he react to the note?"  Umbridge had recovered herself.

     "Who?"  Rebecca wiped a runner of saliva from the corner of her mouth with the handy sleeve of her robe.

     There was a flicker of ugly fury in Umbridge's eyes, but her voice remained calm.  "Snape."

     "Professor Snape?"

     There was an exasperated, phlegmatic cough from Dawlish, and the rheostat of Umbridge's temperament bulged in the hollow of her temple.  Rebecca continued to beam placidly at them.

     "Yes, dear."  Umbridge spat the words as if they were bitter as vinegar in her mouth.  Dawlish gave her an uneasy sidelong glance.

   Rebecca gave no sign that she had heard the scorn in the affirmation.  She smiled brightly and said, "Oh!  He told him to get out and deducted all the points from the Gryffindor House point glass."

     The lurid eagerness that had guttered a moment before in Umbridge's protuberant eyes sprang to hideous life again.  "He did?"  Triumphant and thoughtful.

     "Yes, but he does that all the time.  Between me and Neville, the thing empties about twice a week," she told them helpfully, and giggled.

     "I…see," Umbridge managed after a moment of stewing, thunderstruck silence.  She was white with frustration, and the rings on her fingers clinked together as her stubby fingers shook atop their flabby foundation of middle-aged knee.  

     To her left, Dawlish paused in his meticulous transcription of the questioning to eye her with growing trepidation.  When several seconds passed without her leaping upon Rebecca in screaming, throttling harpy rage, he resumed his scratching with nervous, jerky strokes.

     Umbridge cleared her throat, that odd chirruping sound again.  "You have nightly detentions with Professor Snape, yes?"

     "Yes, ma'am."

     "And what does he do?"

     "He makes me brew Camoflous Draught."

     "Nothing else?"

     "No, ma'am."

     "Does he speak to you?"

     "He asks me questions about potions and their ingredients.  He tells me to work faster or to shut up.  Sometimes he tells me I'm incompetent."  There was a snort of suppressed mirth from Dawlish.

     Umbridge, too, bore an expression that said she rather agreed with his assessment.  "Have you ever noticed anything strange during your time with him?" she asked idly, and offered a smile that suggested she thought Rebecca incapable of noticing her own existence, much less the subtle nuances of impending treachery.

     _Oh, I see everything.  I watched him night after night while I worked and kept him mean, comfortless company in the dark and the cold.  I saw the misery and the worry and the dim terror every time he looked at the sand in the hourglass on the corner of his desk.  I suspect he's afraid of running out of time.  He'd catch it in his hands if he could, trap the tiny grains of it between those entrancing fingers and force it to give him all he demanded of it, but he can't, and it infuriates him.  I see these things and many more, but I'll never tell.  Not yours to know.  Not mine, either, come to think of it.  But it will never go any further._

Rebecca flashed a vague, toothy smile and shook her head.  "No, ma'am."

     "Has he ever done anything to hurt you?"

     Her shoulder twinged with guilty memory, and an image of a black and purple hand branded into white flesh flitted across her mind's eye.  Then mortified black eyes and the feel of gentle lily fingers soothing a dull and throbbing hurt.  She had told him the matter was closed, and she had meant it, and if she had not told McGonagall or the Headmaster, then she would not break her silence now, to this terrible, soulless woman with the eyes of a frog and the tongue of an asp, who would hear no truth save the one she had been sent to find.

     "No, ma'am."

     _Liar, liar._

     That was true, but strangely, she felt neither shame nor guilt, only deep, giddy satisfaction.  She knew that it was not the first, nor would it be last lie she would tell in this intricate dance of liars and watchers and cutthroats.  It was, in fact, going to be a liars' cotillion, and only the best would be left standing when the music stopped.  She intended to be on top of them all.

     _Ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no lies.  Besides, all's fair in love and war._

_     And which is this?_

_     You know the answer to that._

     ""Is there anything else you wish to tell me, dear?" Umbridge said.

     "No ma'am."

     "Very well, then."  But neither she nor her stenographer nee Auror moved.

     Rebecca was quite used to this tactic.  The psychiatrists and counselors at D.A.I.M.S. used it all the time in a lame and futile attempt to plumb the minds of their unwilling patients for their most succulent and closely guarded secrets.  It had never occurred to them that those with nothing to hope for save the passage of seconds, hours, and days that never changed saw no reason to hurry.  She could wait forever.

     A full minute elapsed, then two.  Rebecca began to hum tunelessly, and Dawlish fidgeted and plucked on a curling edge of his parchment.  Umbridge was doing her best to fix her with a penetrating stare, but the intended effect was ruined by the comical bulging of her eyes, which made her look like a terminally surprised frog.

     "Thank you, Miss Stanhope," she said, and stood.  Dawlish scrambled to his feet, the transcript of the interview clutched in a large, hairy-knuckled hand.  He seemed distinctly relieved.

     "Thank you.  I hope I've been helpful."  Rebecca held out her hand to Umbridge.

     Umbridge made no move to take it.  Her lip curled in a minute sneer.  "Yes.  Most helpful," she said weakly.  "Well, goodnight, dear."

     She and her cohort made a beeline for the door before Rebecca could respond, and she watched them go with a furtive smirk of her own.  When Umbridge's squat backside had disappeared through the portrait hole, she rolled to the table and rejoined Seamus and Neville.  

     "Still playing?" she asked.

     "Yeah," Neville said, and dealt her a hand.

     Seamus, however, was regarding her with worried befuddlement.  "What're you doing?"

     "I beg your pardon?" she said blankly, though she knew very well what he meant.

     "That over there," he said, and jerked his head in the direction from which she had come.  "What were you screaming for?"

     Though most of the Aurors were gone, some still lingered in their search.  She could still hear a pair of feet tramping in the dormitories above.

     "I'm dancing, Seamus, dancing to beat the devil," she murmured in a low voice.  "Now shut up and play."

     They did indeed play.  A half dozen hands, as a matter of fact, and during that time, neither boy noticed any marks on Rebecca's hand.  So they were surprised and dismayed to see three readily apparent finger marks there the following morning, as though someone had pinched her in an iron grip.  They were equally surprised, when for the first time, she went to Madam Pomfrey of her own volition.  If anyone had asked, they could have told them how strange it was, but nobody did, and soon enough, they forgot it altogether.     


	36. Pawns in Motion

Chapter Thirty-six

     While Rebecca was dancing for her Potions Master's life beneath the merciless eyes of Madam Toad and her courtier, Albus Dumbledore was making plans of his own.  He was in his office with the Hogwarts staff and Kingsley Shacklebolt, who was seated in his place beside the door, quill and parchment in his lap.  Even Filch was present, though he did not seem to appreciate the rare and unexplained honor.

     "Blast that Peeves," he muttered sourly, massaging his thin, rheumatic knees with arthritic fingers.  "I know he's up to no good without me watchin' him.  What'd you invite me to this bleedin' meeting for?"  He scowled at the Headmaster through narrowed eyes, then remembered whom he was addressing and tacked on a hasty, insincere "sir."  "Need instructions on how to clean the toilets now, do I?  If the bathrooms are a mess, it's not because _I've _cut corners.  It's those ruddy brats, what with their Dung bombs and Stink Pellets.  Some enterprising little sod flushed a piece of Drooble's gum down the toilet on the third floor.  Was mopping shite off the floor until three o'clock in the morning."

     "Mr. Filch!" interrupted McGonagall in scandalized disapproval.  "This is the Headmaster's office, not some seedy pub.  A bit of respect, please."

     "That's quite all right, Minerva," the Headmaster soothed.  "Argus is well within his rights to express his disapproval, even if he does so in…less conventional language."

     "Too right," Filch agreed vehemently, stamping his foot for emphasis.  "All day long I clean up after these ungrateful turds.  Pipes busted and spewin' sewage into the corridors?  Call Filch.  Some smarmy little tosser locked one of his fellows into the rubbish bin out back of the greenhouses?  Get Filch to fetch him out.  And never a word of thanks.  Just 'geroff me'.  What I wouldn't give to hang 'em by their bangers and mash."  He smiled, revealing uneven, yellow teeth, and his eyes had a dreamy, faraway look, as though he could hear already the screams of his victims.  McGonagall gave an offended harrumph, and Professor Moody, no stranger to histrionic rants, rolled his eyes and unscrewed the cap of his hip flask.

     Filch opened his mouth to continue his tirade, but the Headmaster cut him off.  "I appreciate your concerns, Argus, and if you would like, we can discuss them further after the meeting proper, but now I'm afraid there are darker matters afoot."  He took off his spectacles and massaged the bridge of his nose.

     The mood of the room darkened at once.  Crass as it might have been, the caretaker's rant had provided a brief moment of bawdy humor, and humor of any sort had been sorely lacking in the castle since Potter's terrifying collapse.  Even the Weasley twins, resident pranksters extraordinaire, had been conspicuous by their uncharacteristic silence.  The "darker matters" had consumed them all, and no one was in the mood to discuss them still more.

     Professor Vector let out a dispirited sigh and reached into his robes for a roll of antacid tablets, and Professor Flitwick, seated beside McGonagall, sank deeper into his chair, as though he hoped to disappear and avoid the topic altogether.  Moody took a fortifying gulp from his hip flask and stared at the floor.

     After a long and painful silence, McGonagall spoke.  "Would anyone like some tea before we begin?"

     "You can stow your tea, but I wouldn't mind a nip of what Moody's havin," declared Filch, eyeing Moody's flask with longing.

     Moody, in the process of screwing on the cap, froze and surveyed him with beady wariness.  "I'd sooner caper naked into Voldemort's inner circle than let anyone put their hands on my hip flask," he retorted, and stowed the object in question inside his robes.

     There was a moment of appalled contemplation as everyone pondered this.

     "Thank you for that most _interesting_ visual, Alastor," said the Headmaster mildly.  "Now, would anyone like some tea?"

     "I believe I would, Headmaster," said Kingsley.

     "Of course, Kingsley.  Dipply!"

     No sooner had he said the name than an elderly house elf appeared.  She shambled forward and peered myopically over the edge of the Headmaster's desk.

     "The Headmaster has called Dipply?" she squeaked solemnly.

     "Indeed, Dipply.  Would you please bring enough tea for all of us?"

     The elf gazed around the room, taking a silent head count.  Then she turned to the Headmaster again.

     "Is yous wanting sugar and milk?  Scones?"  She tugged nervously on the hem of her Hogwarts toga.

     "Yes, that's a lovely idea," Dumbledore answered.

     "Yes, Headmaster Dumbledore, sir.  I is bringing it right away."  She offered a precarious curtsey and disappeared with a loud crack.  When she was gone, they looked at one another in silence.

     Dumbledore knew the tea was little more than a diversionary tactic, a way to delay the inevitable, but he couldn't blame them.  He didn't want to talk about this, either, particularly the last bit, which he was certain would send Minerva into paroxysms of not altogether spurious outrage.  Even though he knew it was the only chance he had to exonerate Severus, the protector in him quailed.  It was dangerous and foolish and desperate, and there was every chance that it would end in the ruin of not one, but two souls.

     _Never stopped you from sending Harry into the mouth of madness, did it?_

     No, it hadn't, but Harry was-or had been until recently-young and hale and magically powerful beyond imagining.  Rebecca was young and frail and magically unassuming, and though she had spirit and will by the fistful, could, in fact, match the scion of Gryffindor in that regard, he was not convinced of her physical endurance.  She had not been tempered for battle by Quidditch, bouts with bullies in the Muggle world, and vigorous childhood play.  Her transcripts from D.A.I.M.S. indicated that she had refused all attempts at physical therapy after compulsory treatment had ended at age twelve and filled the time with directed individual study of Arithmancy.  For three years, her muscles and bones had atrophied, wasted to nothing, and he feared that neglect of the body in favor of her mind would backfire.

     Three days into what promised to be a long, grueling struggle, she was already beginning to show signs of wear.  Her eyes were irritated and haunted, pouched in rings of bruised flesh, and her hair, bright as the sun when she had first arrived was dull and limp.  Her body was leaching vital nutrients from it to survive.  If she continued as she was for much longer, she would keel over from sheer exhaustion, and Severus' last hope would fade with her.

     _Not if her mind won't let her.  It's as strong as her body is weak, and if she has decided to run this course, it will not _let_ her falter.  It will drive her to the limits of her endurance and one hundred leagues beyond it.  She will run the race until it is finished, and then she will fall down dead._  

_     Can you justify that risk?_

     That was the central question.  Could he, as Headmaster of Hogwarts and guardian de facto of a child willfully oblivious to limits and due care, allow her to take such a monumental risk, even if it were one she was willing to take?  He rubbed his palms together, a dry papery sound in the stillness.  The question nagged at him, and though he knew it was inevitable that he would let her go in the end, he turned it over in his mind all the same, grateful for the distraction.

     She was going to do it.  Of that there was no doubt.  He had seen it in the determined set of her hunched shoulders and the constant subdued indignation in her eyes.  He suspected it physically pained her to see Severus' empty chair in the Great Hall or his desk in the Potions classroom.  Her face grew pinched and wan whenever she looked at them, and her mouth worked as though she were struggling with her gorge.  

     Part of him knew he should intervene, stop her before it was too late.  She was too young, and the gauntlet too long and grueling.  The formidable, if not clumsily wielded power of the Ministry would grind her to powder beneath its churning, remorseless wheels.  Visions of James and Lily, Frank and Alice, just as brash and twice as strong and experienced, loomed inside his head.  All of them had fallen.  How could Rebecca Stanhope hope to stand firm?

     He remembered her as he had seen her on their first meeting in this office, a withered, dried-apple doll with ancient, watchful eyes, fragile as spun glass.  He had wanted to protect her then, swaddle her in a magical cocoon where no harm could ever reach her.  The world had done enough, it had seemed to him, and he had wanted to give her what peace he could.  So why was he so willing to let her jump headlong into the crucible now?

     The simple answer, the sordid, unglamorous answer was expediency.  She could do, with her anonymity and subtle perseverance, what he could not.  She could slip through the cracks and the nets cast by the Aurors and Ministry officials, poke, prod, and pry with virtual impunity.  If she were careful, she could gather the scattered pieces of the puzzle and pore over them at her leisure, ferret out the hows and the whys that more harried, more educated minds could not see.

     But there was more to it than that.  He was going to let her do it because he thought, in the deepest wellsprings of his heart, that she _could._  The force of her will was almost palpable at times, a solid wall that went before her like an unseen shield and trailed in her wake, the faint, persistent pull of a magnet.  She burned with the strength of it, and sometimes as he watched her eat or stare at Draco Malfoy in the Great Hall, he was convinced that she must surely be consumed by it, reduced to ash and powdered bone.  If he ever doubted it, he needed only to recall the look she had given Minerva in this very room not so long ago, a flat, reptilian gaze, rife with mistrust and scorching disdain, a look that said, _I will endure you; I will outlast you._

     What was more, he understood that he could not stop her.  He could order her to leave things be.  He could forbid her from seeking the answers with the mysterious and fabled reasoning of For Your Own Good.  She would smile and nod, say "yes, sir" with perfect sincerity.  And then she would do exactly as she pleased.  Nothing he could say would dissuade her.  Something had happened and was happening still between her and Severus, something he could not yet decipher, and he doubted he ever would.  Whatever it was, she was as bound to it and to the course it demanded as James Potter had once been bound to his path, as he, Albus Dumbledore still was, and she could no more forsake her path than they could.

     _She possesses the brashness of the young, the braggadocio that tells her she is invincible, that she will never grow old and die.  She believes this in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, even her own body, threadbare and precarious and threatening to collapse beneath its own weight._

_     Just like Harry._

He rubbed his aching knuckles.  Harry.  The thought of him filled him with a dismal, feverish guilt and made him feel as if he had aged forty years in as many seconds.  His arthritis, usually little more than a dull, inconsequential gnawing, flared to sudden, voracious life in his hips, knees, and fingers, and he grimaced.

     "All right there, Headmaster Dumbledore, sir?" asked Hagrid, who had foregone the uncomfortable indignity of a chair and sat cross-legged on the floor.

     "Yes, Hagrid, yes," he assured him.  "The chill no longer looks so favorably upon my bones, I'm afraid."  He smiled humorlessly.

     Minerva rose from her seat without a word and marched to the empty fire grate.  She pulled out her wand.  "_Incendio!"_ she muttered grimly, and a fire began to crackle in the hearth.  She surveyed it for a moment to be sure it wouldn't gutter, then marched back to her seat with a prim sniff.

     "Thank you, Minerva," he murmured.

     She gave him a curt nod.  "Certainly, Headmaster."

     He let his thoughts drift to Harry again.  He had gone to see him just after supper, and there had been no change.  He lay as unmoving as ever, his thin face as pale as the moonbeams that washed over it.  Pomfrey and the house elves that tended the Hospital Wing had kept him clean and trimmed his nails, and it had seemed to him as he had hovered over the boy's bedside that he was in a state of suspended animation.

     Only the waxy pallor of his skin and the painful jut of his collarbone from the now-baggy neck of his robes belied the serenity.  Nutritive potion after nutritive potion had been poured down his unresisting throat, but Pomfrey reported dolefully that he grew thinner by the day.  Worse yet, their supplies were running short, and without Severus to replenish their stores, he wasn't sure where they would get more.  Hogwarts students would ice skate on the lakes of Hades before Fudge would give Severus access to potion stores again, much less let him brew anything to be administered to his alleged victim.

     _It'll be St. Mungo's, I suppose.  None are as adept at Severus, but the Mediwizards there can certainly manage a simple nutritive potion.  They might ask questions about why their help was needed when a Potions Master was in residence, but Fudge will muzzle them quickly enough._

     He had watched Harry for as long as he could bear, fussed over his immaculate coverlet and muttered soothing, inane nothings to the musty, cloying air.  Near the end of the visit, when he had been sitting in the straight-backed wooden chair by his bedside, he had reached out and picked up the boy's spectacles.  Unlike their owner, cared for and turned every hour like a choice roast, they had been neglected, left to the dust and the smudges of careless, tidying hands.  

     He had thought, staring and turning them over and over in his restless hands, that seeing them in such a state of sad disrepair was more disturbing than the supine figure on the bed.  It was as though they had already conceded defeat, consigned him to the charnel house.  So he had polished them with the hem of his robes, moved his thumb and the scrip of fabric beneath it in slow, precise circles until the lenses shone and reflected the moonlight with an eerie beauty.  Then he had folded the earpieces and replaced them upon the bedside table.  His way, he supposed, of promising that Harry would one day have cause to wear them again. 

     It was as much for Harry as it was for Severus that he was about to embark on this desperate journey of fervid chance.  Rebecca cared nothing for Harry, he suspected, but maybe if she found the key to this wretched cipher, it would unlock the mystery of his unending sleep.  And if she managed to drag the true culprit kicking and screaming into delayed justice's harsh light, then he would waste no time in forcing him to undo what he had done.

     He would do what he could, naturally.  He would do discreet investigating of his own, dust off rare alchemical texts that had not seen the sun in the turning of the century.  He would go to Gringott's and retrieve the copious notes of the dearly departed and much-lamented Nicholas Flamel.  By the weak, fluttering light of the taper, he would read of potions about which Severus, learned as he was, had only dreamed.  But that and what he was going to set in motion tonight was all he could do.  He could not, as he had done so often, pick up the sword and lead the charge.  That task would be left to smaller, more delicate hands.

     _Let us hope that I will not rue this as grievous error when all is said and done._

     Further contemplation was precluded by the arrival of Dipply with the tea and scones.  She tottered beneath the weight of the silver tea tray she held over her head, and the china plate holding the scones slid dangerously to one side.  She lurched forward and pushed the tray onto his desk.

     "There you is, Headmaster Dumbledore, sir."  She bowed until her ears scraped the floor.

     "Thank you, Dipply."  Vague and dismissive.

     The china plate had reminded him of Severus.  He had gone to see him tonight as well, and he, too, was unchanged from their last meeting.  Silent and stoic.  He was even sitting in the same place upon the sofa, long fingers clamped over his knees as he stared sightlessly at the far wall.  The only sign that he had moved at all was the fact that he had not soiled himself.  His food, brought by a patient, loyal house elf three times a day, remained untouched, and his pale cheeks were being obscured by a steady growth of coarse black stubble.

     Severus' complete inertia frightened him.  He had expected vitriol and tantrums and venomous sarcasm, for these were the time-tested defenses that had seen him through countless hours of torture and humiliation.  Not this complete and unnerving silence that brought to mind the living husks of Frank and Alice Longbottom in their dressing gowns of dirty snow, shambling away the waning hours of their lives in the fetid confines of St. Mungo's.  

     He had been so shaken by it that he had been tempted to slap him, to shake him until the blessedly familiar anger bubbled to the surface again.  In the end, he had refrained because he was afraid that there would _be _no reaction, that no matter how hard he slapped him or how much he shook him, he would only stare wordlessly back at him.  So he had left him as he was.

     "Headmaster Dumbledore, sir?" squeaked Dipply in concern.

     He came to himself with a start.  "Mmm.  Oh?  Oh, yes.  Thank you."

     The elf gave a nervous curtsey and disappeared with another resounding crack, and he and the other teachers spared themselves the discomfiture of looking at one another by helping themselves to tea, sugar, milk, and black currant scones.  The pained, indolent tinkle of metal on porcelain filled the room, and Professor Sinistra jumped when Vector peeled another antacid tablet from the dwindling roll in his hand and dropped it into his tea.

     Dumbledore took a sip of tea.  "Professor Vector, have there been any further incidents with Miss Ogleby?  I spoke to her yesterday after lunch."

     Vector shifted in his seat, balancing his tea saucer on one knee.  "No.  She seemed mostly all right, if not quiet.  Most of Slytherin seems quiet, come to think of it.  Truthfully, I expected more of an outcry from them."

     "That's true," murmured Sprout, who crammed a scone into her mouth and dusted her hands on her robes.  "Draco Malfoy is usually such an obnoxious little prat, but there has been hardly a peep out of him.  I thought I'd like it if he put a sock in it for a spell, but now I find I don't like it at all.  He's got this decidedly shifty look about him.  I'd almost think he was up to something."

     There was an incomprehensible grunt from Moody.

     "He is, like as not," muttered McGonagall.  "Probably awaiting word from his illustrious sire."

     There was a collective groan.  The name Lucius Malfoy was synonymous with trouble in spades.  With his bottomless purse strings and inestimable influence among the ranks of the like-minded wealthy, he could cause elegant havoc with a few well-placed words and missives, and the undeniable fact that Fudge was his lapdog would certainly not help matters.

     "Is there any way we can keep him away from the school?" asked McGonagall without much hope.

     Dumbledore spread his hands in a rare gesture of helplessness.  "Alas, no.  As a parent, he has every right to enter the school grounds."  He picked up a scone and took a small, contemplative bite.

     "Even if he's nothing more than a wretched Death Eater?" she protested bitterly.

     Dumbledore nodded.  "Painful as it sometimes is, there are no qualifications required to be a parent, not even decency.  All one needs is desire and a willing partner."

     McGonagall choked in disgust and took an enormous sip of tea.  "Merlin only knows the trouble he'll cause."

     "Not to mention the others," added Flitwick gloomily as he eyed the tepid dregs of his tea.  "Parkinson is always looking for an opportunity to throw his money around, and Crabbe and Goyle, Srs. are at Malfoy's beck and call."

     "Like fathers, like sons," said McGonagall sardonically.

     Dumbledore reached for the bowl of lemon sherbets on his desk, plucked one from among its comrades, and popped it into his mouth.  He was well aware of the pandemonium Lucius could cause were he so inclined.  In fact, he had been expecting it.  That he had not yet made an appearance, armed with his ostentatious walking stick and nauseating hauteur, struck him as odd.  By all rights, he should have been here by now, striding through the corridors and looking around with half-lidded eyes, marking everything in sight with his singular brand of disdain.  He would never miss an opportunity to cross words, wits, and wands with the man he regarded as the corporeal embodiment of everything amiss in his world, nor would he forego a chance to be hovering on the periphery should there be a sudden vacancy in the Headmastership.

     _Perhaps young Draco has not yet informed his father of what has happened._

     Poppycock.  The younger Malfoy, every inch the son of his father, had been conditioned to seek out his father in times of crisis, or indeed, in times of mild discomfort.  Experience had taught him that he could hope for a swift and favorable resolution to the matter at hand.  It was inconceivable that he would not turn to him now, when it must seem to him-and not without reason, the Headmaster was embarrassed to admit-that his whole world was teetering on the brink of disaster.  

     _Perhaps the owl has not yet arrived._

     He dismissed that, too, as hopeful naiveté.  Often had he heard Draco boasting to his friends about the speed and incomparable efficiency of his eagle owl, and though smug showboating was not an uncommon ailment for him, or any of the other boys for that matter, he had no doubt that he was telling the truth.  He himself used an eagle owl for urgent correspondence and international post.  No, if he had used his own owl, and there was no reason he shouldn't have, the letter would have arrived days ago.

     "Twenty Galleons says Lucius Malfoy is going to make trouble before the end," grunted Moody.  The silver flask reappeared.

     "Oh, I've no doubt about that," agreed Dumbledore, his fingers tented beneath his chin.  "Then again, if he doesn't, it could be much worse."

     "How do you mean?" asked Sinistra, puzzled.

     He did not answer her.  She, Sprout, and Vector, though they must surely harbor their suspicions about the things Severus did in the middle of the night, were not full members of the Order and were not aware of his status as a spy.  It wasn't that he mistrusted them; indeed he had full confidence in every member of his staff, even Filch, who was glaring mutinously at him, and who swore every week that he would quit but never did.  But the fewer people who knew about Severus' covert service to the Light, the fewer that could be tortured into surrendering such sensitive information to the Death Eaters.

     "Well," he answered after a moment of consideration, "it has been my experience that the quieter the enemy, the more ferocious the attack."

     This seemed to pacify Sinistra, but from the corner of his eye he saw Minerva take a hasty sip of tea to cover a huff of dry amusement.  Kingsley, too, had seen through the transparent veil of his flimsy excuse, and his smooth brown brow furrowed in unease.  Moody sat up in his seat and stroked his chin, his magical eye spinning in thoughtful circles.

     Filch scowled and leaned forward in his chair, gnarled hands planted on his skinny thighs.  "Well, all this is bloody fascinatin', Headmaster, but what does it have to do with me?" he asked impatiently.

     "We're coming to that, Argus, but first we must discuss other matters," Dumbledore replied, grateful for the diversion from the current, dangerous line of questioning.

     Filch slouched in his seat, muttering something that sounded suspiciously like, _we'll be here all bloomin' night, we will,_ and scuffed his heavy leather boots along the carpet.

     "Namely," Dumbledore said when the muttering had ceased, "has a bezoar been found?"

     There was a derisive snort from Moody, and he propped the open flask against his thigh and leaned forward to grip his walking stick in rough, leathery hands.  "I expect my application for one from the Ministry was consigned to the legendary circular file the moment it crossed an Auror's desk," he said wryly.  "Pointy-headed bureaucrats have no concept of caution.  One disrespectful berk not much older than the Weasley twins as much as told me I'd cried wolf one time too many."  He tugged indignantly on the hem of his robes.

     "Imagine that."  Vector stirred his third cup of tea.

     Moody shot him a withering glare, but said nothing.  He reached for his flask, which was slipping drunkenly against his leg.  

     Dumbledore smiled wistfully.  Moody's bizarre and strident demands and accusations were the stuff of Auror lore at the Ministry.  From the day of his retirement, he had continually requested bezoars to fend off imagined poisoning attempts.  It made no difference that he lived alone and refused to allow even the house elves to prepare his food.  The Aurors learned soon enough to disregard his ravings, and until the incident with the possessed rubbish bins last year, things had been quiet.  Now his manic paranoia had returned to haunt them.

     Not that his own attempts to procure one had gone any better.  All known clandestine avenues had turned up empty.  Mundungus had broached the subject of black market bezoars and healing stones with every street urchin in Knockturn Alley and several miles beyond.  All he had gotten for his efforts were sly, black-toothed smiles and whispered promises.  All for naught.

     Aberforth had been of no help, either.  The goat that had gotten him into such trouble as an impetuous young man had given up the ghost, and when he had checked its stomach contents in the hope of finding a bezoar, he had come away empty-handed.  He had agreed to ask about goats with a penchant for eating rocks the next time he went to a breeder, but that was weeks away, and there was no guarantee he would find one.

     "What about St. Mungo's?" asked Sprout.

     Dumbledore shook his head.  "Too closely tied with Lucius.  Even if they gave us one, we couldn't trust that it hadn't been Cursed."

     "Isn't there anyplace in this insular, incestuous little world that hasn't been touched by the darkness?" snapped Sinistra in exasperation.

     "Nothing within our borders is safe anymore."  Kingsley tapped the shaft of his quill against his knee in a sloppy, meandering rhythm.

     Dumbledore sighed, then stiffened abruptly as realization struck him.  "What did you say, Kingsley?" he said slowly.

     The quill ceased its nervous patter, and the Auror looked nonplussed.  "Headmaster?"

     "Just now, Kingsley; what did you say?" he repeated urgently.

     Kingsley shrugged.  "I said nothing within our borders was safe anymore."

     "Indeed, indeed you did," Dumbledore murmured, and his mind raced with the sudden possibility Kingsley had offered.  He reached for a quill and a scrip of parchment.

     "Headmaster, what is it?"  Minerva had set aside her tea and was staring at him with an expression of diffuse concern.

     "Mr. Shacklebolt's comment has reminded me of a fact I had previously overlooked."  He dipped the tip of his quill into his inkwell and began to write in excited, looping strokes.

     "Oh?"  Intrigued.

     "Quite.  The sun rises and sets over the world, not just Great Britain."  He set down his quill with a sharp satisfied snap.

     "Naturally.  There are, I believe, seven continents," Minerva agreed.  "But I don't see your point."

     "A wonder of the British educational system."  Vector crunched another tablet.

     "Oh, stow it," she retorted.  "You sound like Severus."

     There was a long, pained silence.  All the color drained from her face, and her mouth worked soundlessly for a moment.  Then she closed it with a boneless, wet _plip._  She removed her spectacles and stabbed them onto her face again.

     "Forgive me, Headmaster.  That was inappropriate," she said weakly.

     "You are quiet correct in your assessment of world geography, Minerva," Dumbledore said placidly, and he saw her shoulders slump with relief.  "And on five continents beside our own, there are witches and wizards who may be able to help.  As for Professor Vector's wit, I daresay Severus would be offended at the comparison."  Another sad smile.

     "Who are you thinking of asking, Headmaster?" Moody asked.  "Karkaroff won't be of any help.  What about the French woman, what was her name?"  He flapped one hand as he struggled with his memory.  "Maxine?  Maximy?"  He snapped his fingers.  Maxime, Madam Maxime, it was."   

     "Yes, perhaps, though she was not who I had in mind," Dumbledore conceded.  "And it would seem strange to the post examiners for me to be in contact with Beaubatons.  The United States, on the other hand…"  He trailed off and took a sip of tea.

     "You're thinking of asking that Donnelly woman for a bezoar?" Minerva said, thunderstruck.

     _That Donnelly woman_ was Minerva's disdainful epithet of choice for the intractable, wholly uncooperative Headmistress of D.A.I.M.S.  She had rebuffed every effort to buy Dinks from the institution, and her last letter had made it quite plain that she would entertain no further offers.  The tone of her letters had been abrupt and businesslike, and Minerva, upon spying one on his desk, had read it and proclaimed her a boorish cow.

     "She wouldn't give you one if you held her over the mouth of Hades and threatened to let go," she avowed.

     "Likely not, but perhaps the singularly American need to come to the rescue will sway her."

     "Anything is worth a try at this point," said Moody.  "Potter is no better."

     "How long until we can expect a reply?"  McGonagall picked up a scone and put it down again.

     Dumbledore thought for a moment.  "If I send it tomorrow, three weeks, give or take."

     "Three weeks," Minerva moaned.  "An eternity.  Why not use the Floo network?"

     "They are not connected internationally.  They are connected to the school in Salem, however; perhaps we can arrange a patch call."  He made another note on his parchment.  "Now, is there anything else before we get to the matter at hand?"

     Sinistra put up her hand.  "Sir, have you given any more thought as to who will be the interim Head of Slytherin House?"  She grimaced apologetically.  Minerva paused in her absent-minded rearrangement of the remaining scones on the plate and stared shrewdly at him.  

     Though he was seventy years her senior and her superior, he squirmed beneath her unsettling gaze.  He masked his discomfiture by slowly removing his spectacles and polishing them against the sleeve of his robe.  

     "No," he admitted.  "I haven't."

     "Albus, you must," implored Minerva with an exasperated sigh.  "If you don't, that imbecile, Fudge, will start poking about.  He may even appoint one for you."

     "That he most certainly will not," Dumbledore said, and though it was little more than a whisper, it was the cool steel of conviction.  "I am still Headmaster here."

     "Yes, you are," she agreed gently.  "And the Slytherins need guidance."

     A strangled guffaw from Moody.  "There's a world of difference between what they need and what they want.  Snape has let them govern themselves for the most part, I'll wager.  The Slytherin philosophy of self-reliance.  Anyone else tries to bring them to heel, they're liable to come out of the experience with more than a passing resemblance to me."

     Dumbledore remained silent.  The truth was, he could not bring himself to twist the knife into Severus any further, any more than he could leave Harry's glasses uncleaned.  The silver and jade serpent lying on the corner of his desk was Severus' pride, his mark of distinction.  He had worn it on the collar of his robes for seventeen years, and as far as he had been concerned, it was _his_.  His prize for service painfully rendered.  The moment he pinned it to another collar, Fudge would carry the tidings to the dungeons with giddy feet, crow about the latest affront to his captive's mercilessly assailed honor, and there would be no hope of pulling Severus away from the edge of the yawning abyss.  He would go to it with arms outstretched.

     "I will come to that decision in my own time," he said finally.

     Minerva opened her mouth to remonstrate, but from the corner of his eye, Dumbledore saw Moody shoot her a measured, cautionary look.  _Don't press him.  _She closed her mouth and squared her shoulders with a desultory scowl.  He stifled a guilty sigh of relief.

     "At last we come to it," he announced.  He straightened in his chair and folded his hands.  "Filius, has Miss Stanhope been to see you about those Quidditch Charms?"  He spared a sidelong glance at Minerva, who looked thoroughly confused.

     Flitwick nodded.  "Yes.  She approached me about them after her Charms lesson."

     "Good, good.  I trust you know what to do?  Give her _whatever_ help she requires."  As he had expected, Minerva did not miss the subtle emphasis on the word "whatever," and she stiffened in her seat.

     "Certainly, Headmaster.  I've no doubt she will be a most apt pupil."  In her seat, Minerva's eyes narrowed dangerously, but she said nothing.

     "Nor do I.  In fact, I'm counting on it."  

     Minerva was now ramrod-straight in her chair.  "What is this about, Headmaster?"  Her eyes darted between his face and that of Flitwick, twin flecks of amber in her wary face.

     "Something that must be done, Minerva," he said calmly, and shifted his attention to Kingsley, who was watching the proceedings with genteel interest.  "Kingsley, you are a member of the team posted outside Severus' chambers?"

     "Yes, sir.  Tonks takes my place when I'm here."  

     "You are familiar with a young lady named Rebecca Stanhope?"

     Kingsley nodded.  "The one that rides in that wheeled chair."

     "Indeed.  I have reason to believe she will be paying a visit to Professor Snape in the near future, and I would be grateful were you to turn a blind eye to her arrival."

     Minerva shot to her feet.  "What?  Albus, _Headmaster_, you can't be serious!  Letting a student visit a man under suspicion of attempted murder!  With all due respect, have you taken leave of your senses?"

     "Minerva, upon my word, I will explain.  If you would only allow me to finish."

     She stared at him, hands fisted and trembling at her sides.  Then she sat with a furious, disbelieving huff.  Flitwick shrank from her in mild alarm, and she spared him a disapproving scowl.  

     "Will you do me this favor, Kingsley?" Dumbledore prompted.  The Auror had remained wisely silent during Minerva's outburst.

     "If you wish, Headmaster, but I can't offer any guarantees about Dawlish."  He spiced his fellow Auror's name with contempt.

     "Ah.  Leave him to me."  A faint smile curled around the corners of his mouth, and the mischievous twinkle, so often absent in these terrible days, rekindled in his eyes.

     "Very good, Headmaster."  Kingsley gave a curt nod and doodled on the parchment on his knee.

     "That goes for all of you."  Dumbledore pushed his glasses onto the bridge of his nose and gazed at his assembled staff.  "Give her what she requires to see this through, including access to the restricted section of the library should she need it.  Alastor, I suspect she will come to you ere long."

     Moody stamped his wooden leg irritably against the carpet.  "I imagine so.  What is she doing, Dumbledore?"

     He answered without hesitation.  "The impossible, Alastor."

     In her seat beside the uncharacteristically grave Flitwick, Minerva was throttling a linen napkin, twisting it between her strong, wiry fingers.   Her eyes were blazing, and he knew that when her colleagues filed out and the door shut behind them, she was going to unleash a fullisade of protests against this latest madcap dash to justice.  

     So he was ridiculously grateful when Filch suffered a fortuitous fit of pique.

     "Well, pleased as I am to watch the powers that be flap their gums at one another," he trumpeted in his nasally rasp, "I still haven't got the faintest idea why I'm here."  He was hunched and scowling in his chair, a surly, molting vulture.

     "And we come to you at last, Argus," said the Headmaster patiently, his face a mask of unblemished serenity.  

     "'Bout bloomin' time," Filch muttered disagreeably.

     "I need the Watcher to close his eyes."

     Filch mulled this over, his craggy, greasy forehead furrowed in agonized concentration.  "You need what?"

     Dumbledore sighed.  "I need you to relax your time-honored rules and let her pass unhindered."

     Filch went a deep plum and sprang from his chair with the muffled cellophane crackle of pained joints.  "You want me to let an obnoxious fifth-year roam the corridors unchecked?" he wheezed incredulously, eyes bulging.

     "Obnoxious?  I've always thought her most polite," he said blandly.

     Filch sneered, and now he was nearly capering in his outrage.  "Polite?  Every blasted night, Professor Snape had me march her to his classroom.  Thought I was finally shut of her, and now you want me to let her run amok in the middle of the night?"

     "If I'm not mistaken, Argus, you and Professor Snape have always got on relatively well?"

     "He doesn't make me want to vomit," Filch conceded.

     "Indeed.  You've always approved of his stringent discipline, and I would venture to guess you've noticed the pointed disdain in which most of the students hold him?"

     "Too right I have," Filch said fiercely.  "Whinging little bastards.  No respect for authority.  Want everything to be candy and flowers, they do.  Indolent little-"

     Dumbledore interrupted before the tirade could gather steam.  "Exactly, Argus.  And now some of his least grateful pupils are out to do him a grave injustice.  You know how vengeful they can be."

     "Yes, I do," Filch said softly.  "Like the Potter brat.  String Snape up by his toes and boil him in oil if he could.  All the wrong in the world comes from him and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, according to that little turd."  Filch shuffled his feet and rubbed the underside of his long, thin nose.

     Dumbledore blinked, nonplussed by such an astute observation from his taciturn, shambling caretaker.  But he only said.  "So you see why you must do this."

     "Bloody hell," was Filch's only response, but by the belligerent droop of his shoulders, it was clear that he saw no choice.

     "You do not see her, Argus, even if she is treading upon your toes."

     "No need to bring out the damned point hammer, Headmaster," muttered Filch testily.  "I'm old, not thick.  I don't see the brat or that machine of hers, but it's no business of mine if the Aurors catch her out."

     "Indeed not," he agreed.

     "Now, if there's nothing else, I'd like to be getting back to my rounds.  Some delinquent sneaks off and falls out of the Astronomy Tower, and it won't be your eminent arse hoisted up the flagpole.  Beggin' your pardon, Headmaster," he said, though he sounded not the least bit sorry.

     "Yes, you may go, Argus," he said wearily, and the man turned and hobbled toward the door with surprising speed.  "The rest of you are free to go as well, unless you have something you'd like to discuss."

     His staff departed, round-shouldered and yawning.  All save Minerva, who was sitting in her chair as though rooted there by unbearable gravity.  

      "Now, Minerva-," Dumbledore began.

     "Merlin bless you, Albus, but you've cracked," she said bluntly, and drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair.

     "Oh?" he said, feigning surprise.

     "Don't be coy," she snapped.  Then, in a calmer voice, "You know exactly what I'm talking about.  How could you even entertain such a notion?  Sending a young girl to do such a dangerous and foolish thing?"

     "I don't see any choice."

     "Of course there is a choice!  There is always a choice!"  She rose and began to pace restlessly.  "You told me so yourself.  You can choose to do nothing."

     He leaned back in his chair and scrubbed his face with his hands.  "Not this time, my dear Minerva."

     She stopped and stared at him.  "Why not?  Because it's Severus?"  There was no scorn, only honest bewilderment.

     "Yes."

     She snorted.

     "And because of Harry."

     "What has Harry to do with your misplaced affinity for Severus?"  She resumed her pacing.

     "Nothing.  But if Miss Stanhope can get to the bottom of this mystery, it may bring the perpetrator to light."

     She froze again.  "Perpetrator?  Albus, we _have_ the culprit."  She gave a despairing sigh.

     "I cannot believe that."  He rubbed his throbbing eyes with his fingertips, their coolness soothing the irritated sting.

     "And I refused to believe that Peter Pettigrew blew up twelve Muggles and betrayed James and Lily, but it was so, Albus, it was so."

     "And for all of those years, you believed an innocent man guilty," he pointed out.

     She blanched, and her thin lips disappeared inside her face.  "I admit my mistakes are many," she said quietly.

     "And I am not casting blame," he soothed.  "I am merely saying that it is possible you are mistaken again."

     There was a long pause as she considered this.  "Even if I were," she answered at length, "why trust Stanhope?"  The child can't even plait her hair without help."

     "That is precisely why, Minerva.  Her weakness makes her invisible to the Aurors, gives her a freedom we cannot hope to achieve."

     "And that same weakness will be her undoing," she countered.

     "Her will shall carry her when her body cannot.  She will do this whether we approve or not."

     "Then stop her.  Make her see reason.  There are things she was never meant to do," she said adamantly.

     "And who are we to judge what those things may be?"

     "Stop rationalizing," she hissed.  "What you ask of her is Daedalian hubris."

     "I ask no more of her than she is willing to give.   We have asked more of Harry, and you have never lodged an objection."

     "Harry?" she nearly screamed.  Then she stopped herself and ran a shaking hand over her robes.  "Harry, Albus?  Yes, yes, we have, and look where it got him."  The last words trailed off into a miserable moan, and she sank into the nearest chair and buried her face in her hands.  "Why, Albus, _why_ must you do this?" she beseeched him without looking up.

     "A thousand races have I run for others, Minerva.  It is time I ran for Severus."

     "But you're not Albus.  It's a fifteen-year-old girl who cannot walk, much less run."  She tittered humorlessly.

     He left his chair and went to sit beside her.  "Then let us hope her wheels hide wings of gold," he murmured, and wrapped an arm around her bony shoulders.  She sank into him with a sigh.

     From his perch, Fawkes watched them with gimlet amber eyes, and the sands of the hourglass shifted inexorably onward. 


	37. Reawakening of the Serpent

Chapter Thirty-Seven

     At half-past seven the following morning, Dumbledore found himself heading to Severus' frozen chambers.  He winced as he moved, the cold sinking its gleeful, biting teeth into the joints of his hips.  He stifled a yawn.  He had slept little the night before, had, in fact, awakened at just after two o'clock to find that both he and Minerva had fallen asleep where they sat, heads drooping onto their chests.  Even after she had departed with a hurried and rather chagrined adieu, he had remained before the smoldering embers of the fire, too tired and worn out to make the journey up the spiral staircase to his bedchamber.

     His hand drifted to the pocket of his robes, and he withdrew a chunk of Medi-Chocolate wrapped in bronze foil that he had nicked from the Hospital Wing before setting off.  Pomfrey, bless her intrepid soul, had tutted and fussed at him to have a liedown and some heartening warm beef broth, but he had politely declined and exerted his right as Headmaster to commandeer the slab of chocolate instead.

     _You'll be hearing from both her _and _Minerva before the day is out._

He broke off a piece of the chocolate and slipped it into his mouth, rolling the smooth, rich chocolate over his tongue with a sigh of relish.  Warmth flooded him, filling the hollow places in his bones and making his fingertips tingle.  His footsteps, heretofore dogged by weariness, lightened, and he moved with a renewed sense of buoyancy.  Though he had no conscious intention of doing so, he began to hum, a soft, cheerful buzz in the early morning stillness.  He pocketed the rest of the Medi-Chocolate and continued on his way.

     This early, the castle corridors were nearly deserted.  Here and there, a bright-eyed house elf scurried just beyond the range of his vision, savoring the sweet ambrosia of toil, and every now and then, he passed a bleary-eyed pupil as they shambled to the library or to the Great Hall for breakfast.  The Fat Friar hovered somnolently beside the cramped, damp corridor that led to the dungeons, chatting idly with a bored Auror posted to keep watch over who entered.

     "Hello, Headmaster," said the Friar, and he gave a small bow.  The Auror straightened and gave a curt nod, but said nothing.

     "Good morning, Friar," Dumbledore answered.  Then, to the suddenly uncommunicative Auror, "Good morning, young man."

     The Auror scowled and shifted uneasily from foot to foot.  "Sir."  Terse. Cool.  Mildly affronted.

     There was an outraged snort from the Fat Friar, but Dumbledore silenced him with a warning glance.  He was too preoccupied with the task that awaited him at the end of the corridor to spare precious energy on a useless squabble with Ministry officials.  Severus was a difficult man under the best of circumstances, and now, caged, cornered, and stripped of every vestige of dignity he had ever managed to acquire, it would be all but impossible to jolt him from the fugue of hopeless despair in which he had immersed himself.  

     He left the Auror and the miffed Friar behind and let the darkness of the dungeon corridor swallow him.  His nose wrinkled at the faint smell of mildew and the sharper, greener smell of mossy rot.  It was always ten degrees cooler here than anywhere else in the castle, deprived as it was of the sun's warming rays, and moss and lichen flourished in the corners and the divots gouged in the walls by the slow, persistent wear of time.  He had approached Severus numerous times about casting a Warming spell or having the walls scrubbed by a cadre of industrious house elves, but all such offers had been refused with clipped civility, and as none of the students had ever suffered any ill effects, he had let the matter lie.

     His breath misted before him in a shimmering gossamer fog, and his shoes clacked sharply on the stone.  Up ahead, he could see the shadowed outlines of Kingsley and Dawlish as they stood outside the door to Severus' chambers, hands clasped behind their backs, eyes facing forward, silent as the gargoyle that guarded his office from uninvited guests.  Save for the occasional stamp of feet to keep the blood flowing, the corridor was absolutely still.

     "Good morning, gentlemen," he said as he drew near.  Neither man turned to face him, but Kingsley's eyes slid surreptitiously in his direction.

     "Been visiting our friend here quite a bit," observed Dawlish suspiciously.

     "Severus, until he is convicted of the crime of which he is accused, is still under my care," he said crisply.  "As such, it is my duty to make sure that he is not planning to harm himself."

     Dawlish looked dimly alarmed at this.  The thought that his victim might rob him of the opportunity for further torment by killing himself had apparently not crossed his mind.  His lips twitched, as though he were about to say something further, but then he pressed them together with an irritated nod.

     _Oh, dear, _he thought dismally_, I've probably given them incentive for another strip search._  He suppressed a pained grimace at the terrible thought and reached for the door handle.  To his surprise, Kingsley's long, supple fingers closed over his forearm.

     "I'm afraid, Headmaster, that I'm going to have to accompany you," he said, and his face was inscrutable in the dim and wavering torchlight.

     "On what grounds?" he demanded coolly.  He was so taken aback by this unexpected turn of events that feigned outrage was unnecessary.

     Kingsley did not hesitate.  "How do I know you're not planning to slip him the means to escape justice?"

     "I believe the Ministry has installed Listening Charms to be sure that no one is planning any ill-advised escape attempts," he retorted calmly.

     Kingsley only gazed at him with half-lidded eyes.  "Yes, but one need not make a sound to slip someone a dagger or a phial of poison."  His lip curled in a faint, mirthless smile.

     "I have no intention of doing any such thing."

     "Either I accompany you inside, Headmaster, or I strip search you, same as your friend in there."  He jerked his head in the direction of the closed door, and there was a muffled snort of wry appreciation from Dawlish, who was watching the unfolding drama with an expression of soporific joy.

     "I see," he said shortly.  "Very well."

     With a satisfied nod, Kingsley released his grip on his forearm and opened the door with a deft flick of his wrist.  Then he stepped inside and beckoned him to follow with three fingers of one elegant hand.  Off-balance for one of the few times in his life, Dumbledore did as he was told, and then the door closed behind him.

     He opened his mouth to ask what was afoot, but Kingsley lifted a slender ebony finger to his lips, and behind the upraised digit, a smile curled in the corners of his mouth.  His eyes sparkled with mischievous cunning, and before he spun away, Dumbledore saw his hand disappear into his robes.  All at once, comprehension dawned, and his hunched shoulders relaxed.  He fought an unseemly gormless titter.

     Listening Charms.  Severus' rooms were covered with them.  In cornices, beneath his bed, even in the lavatory.  It would be dangerous to speak freely here, and were he not so tired, he would have remembered it, but he had been so eager to jolt his Potions Master from his unmoving apathy that he had nearly done something heretofore absent from his list of foibles-acted with undue haste.  He groped in the pockets of his robes for a lemon sherbet.

     He watched in thoughtful silence as Kingsley moved through the rooms, tapping the tip of his wand against likely locations for the Charms, swift and stealthy as shadow.  Wardrobes, cupboards, and chests were all opened and inspected.  Then the rugs and pillows were searched by deft, knowing hands.  When he found a Charm, he tapped the area with the tip of his wand and marked it with a glimmering orb of red light.  

     Tap.  Tap.  Tap.  A dozen tiny bonfires ignited in the gloomy cornices and deep recesses of Severus' cupboards.  The carpet beneath his feet was blanketed with them, as though it had sprouted a crop of mushrooms in the night.  Thirty, then forty.  They extended from the threshold to the bedroom to the lavatory, an enormous, twining, serpentine line of them.  

     _Did they know that was they shape they were making when they set them?  One more jibe at his helpless honor?_  

     He doubted it.  Fudge wasn't that subtle, and in any case, Severus would not have been able to see the pattern the Charms made, and therefore would have little reason for frothing hysteria.  Not that he had been engaging in any of that of late.  He frowned at the inert figure of his Potions Master perched on the sofa like a breathing effigy.

     _He wouldn't need to see, just them.  It would be enough for them to know that they were using the symbol of his own House against him.  They could tread upon it and laugh, take perverse joy in their unspoken knowledge.  The sadistic joy of it would be in their eyes while they mocked him and tortured him and spat upon his dignity.  They would draw upon it when they wearied, and use it as a shield against feeble pangs of conscience._

     This particular train of thought disgusted him, and so he crunched the last of the sherbet lemon, which was suddenly too sweet in his mouth, between his teeth and moved to stand before the sofa.

     "Good morning, Severus," he said quietly, and pushed his spectacles onto the bridge of his nose.

     The only response from the man on the sofa was an imperceptible twitch of the jaw.  This close, Dumbledore could smell the pungent reek of dirt and body odor.  The stubble on Severus' cheeks was coarser than ever, and his formerly meticulous robes were wrinkled and limp.  His brutally short fingernails were caked with grime and what looked suspiciously like dried blood.

     Ignoring the protests of his nose and knees, he crouched until he was eye to eye with his wayward child.  "Severus, what have you done?" he whispered.  Silence.  Only the slow blink of lifeless eyes.

     He felt like weeping as he took one of the dirty hands in his own and extended one of the lax lily fingers, fingers that knew the secrets and delicate nuances of potions beyond counting, and brought it up for a closer look.  Sure enough, he recognized the dull rust of old blood beneath the thin crescents of nail.  He moaned softly.  He thought he knew where it came from, and with numb, shaking hands, he reached out and gently pushed up the left sleeve of Severus' robes.

     He flinched.  Severus had obviously been at it for hours, even days.  Every inch of the Dark Mark was covered in open sores in various stages of healing.  Some were raw and bleeding; others were covered with fragile scales of hard skin.  The eyes of the grinning skull were home to a pair of ruthlessly deep gouges, as though he had tried to rip imaginary eyes from their sockets, and blood leaked from the wounds in sluggish trails.

     "Oh, Merlin.  Severus, why?" he asked weakly, and cupped his hand over the wounded flesh.  It was a useless gesture, but he needed to do something other than gape.

     Kingsley threaded his way through the maze of furniture and Listening Charms and came to stand beside him.  The Auror's lips pulled away from his teeth in a surprised grimace when he glanced down at the partially obscured flesh of Severus' forearm.

     "Merlin in a tarnished tea cozy," he muttered, and turned his head in revulsion.  Then he collected himself, turned to him, and mouthed, _Fifty-six._

     _Can you neutralize them? _came the soundless retort.

     _I think so, but I'll need enough noise to cover what I'm doing._

_     Leave that to me.  If you would, go to the Hospital Wing and get some ointment from Madam Pomfrey.  Some of these look infected.  If anyone asks, I've had a sudden attack of hemorrhoids._

     Kingsley shot him a startled glance, no doubt pained by the thought of his considerably wrinkled nether regions, but after a moment he nodded and turned to go.  _Yes, Headmaster._

     When he was gone and the door had closed behind him, Dumbledore rose from his deep crouch with a grimace and seated himself on the sofa beside Severus.

     He patted the younger man's hand.  "That was foolish, my boy," he chided softly, and his voice caught in his throat.  "It's rather cold in here.  If you don't mind?"  He withdrew his wand from his robes and raised an eyebrow in mute inquiry.

     When there was no response, he pointed his wand at the empty fire grate and murmured, _"Incendio!"_  A fire roared to life in the hearth, and he stretched his frozen hands to it.  "That's better, don't you think?" he ventured, but there was no answer.

     He dropped his hands and sighed.  "This silence is utterly childish, Severus, and will achieve nothing.  Neither will wallowing in self-pity and your own filth."

     Severus only blinked.

     "What would your pupils think if they could see you in such a sorry state?" he asked in an appeal to his vanity.  "You, who have eschewed any sign of weakness, sulking like a histrionic woman jilted by her lover."

     He knew he wasn't being fair, that Severus' dire situation was nothing so fleeting, but he was trying to stoke the embers of his anger, ignite that volatile, endless temper into new life.  If he were properly furious, he would not sit idly by like some broken and discarded doll.  His pride would not allow it.  He would fight, no matter how passively, and he, Dumbledore, wanted, _needed _him to fight.  If he didn't resist, his gross apathy would bring Stanhope down with him. 

     He grabbed Severus' pale hand and thrust it toward the fire.  "You're freezing.  It isn't wise for a Potions Master to neglect his hands."  He rubbed the dirty fingers briskly between his own, forcing the blood to frigid fingertips.

     Predictably by now, there was no response from Severus.  He only sat and blinked.  

     Dumbledore simultaneously longed to enfold him in a comforting embrace and slap him until his cheeks bled, but he did neither.  Instead, he busied himself with massaging warmth into glacial fingers which lay like the legs of an albino spider in his palm.

     "I suppose you think you're martyring yourself," he said suddenly, "withdrawing into yourself like some tragic Byronian hero."  He mustered a snort.  "I really thought you knew better.  Haven't you been haranguing Potter about just that sort of mawkish, self-pitying behavior for years?"

     Potter.  If anything was guaranteed to re-ignite the fury in Severus' soul, it would be the subject of his pet nemesis.  He had never yet missed an opportunity to vent his boundless rage about Potter upon anyone unfortunate enough to bring him up, to remind them all of the sacrifices he had made on behalf of the "puling, ungrateful wretch" that James Potter had left behind in mocking legacy.  Given the circumstances in which Severus now found himself, it was only fitting that Harry be the catalyst to wrench him from his self-imposed stupor.

     He waited for the ugly plum flush to creep into Severus' cheeks, for black eyes to narrow and glitter with long-nurtured and well-fed malice, for the nostrils of his long, crooked nose to flare like the hood of a cobra that has scented prey, but nothing happened.  Not even a snort.  Eyes remained wide and lifeless as ever, marbles pushed into dough, and the cobra did not rear its poisonous head.

     _You're letting them win, _Dumbledore wanted to shout.  _Do you think that Fudge and his lackeys care one whit if you sink into unreachable apathy, that they will suddenly lament their cruelty and set off in search of the truth simply because you've closed yourself off?  You can't possibly.  You know better, Severus!  You're only making it easier for them.  Fight.  With your serrated tongue and your ruthless wit.  With sheer obstinacy, if you must.  _ _Anything but sit, Severus, anything but this dribbling facility._  But he didn't.  He couldn't.  If one syllable of these thoughts reached Fudge's burning ears, he and his underlings would be here in a trice to truss them both and drag them off to Azkaban on charges of sedition.

     The door opened, and Kingsley entered carrying a bottle of salve.  He closed the door and brought the bottle to him.  Then he reached into his robes and produced a jar filled with a creamy, yellow substance.

     "Essence of murtlap," Kingsley said, speaking concisely so that the Listening Charms could record every word.  "Madam Pomfrey told me it would ease the discomfort and swelling."

     "Splendid," he answered, equally loudly, "I must admit, it has made for an uncomfortable few days."  

     "Indeed, Headmaster."  The Auror's voice was cool, neutral, but he was biting his cheek to stifle a spate of slightly hysterical laughter as he retreated to the other side of the room.

     Dumbledore sympathized perfectly well.  He, too, was keenly aware of the absurdity of the entire affair as he unscrewed the cap on the bottle of salve, dipped his fingers into it, and began to slather it onto the raw, scraped pocks on Severus' forearm.  He, the preeminent Headmaster of a venerated school of witchcraft and wizardry, and an experienced Auror, were hiding their subterfuge in the flimsy guise of clandestine hemorrhoid treatment.  How very juvenile.  Not a ploy one was likely to find in the Auror or Unspeakables training handbook.

     "Might sting a bit, Severus," he murmured as he dabbed more salve onto the wounded forearm.

     He was too tired to conjure a more sophisticated plan, the reservoir of his cunning stretched far too thinly over three separate fronts, perhaps a fourth should Lucius enter the fray.  If inventing an embarrassing ailment kept the Aurors away long enough to do what needed to be done, then he would use it.  Panache was not a requirement for success.

     He closed the bottle of salve.  "There you are," he told the still unmoving figure on the sofa.  "That should prevent the necessity for amputation in future."

     From his place on the opposite side of the room, Kingsley drew his wand.  _Shall I begin? _he mouthed.

     He nodded and rose from the sofa.  "Well, you've left me no choice," he said gravely to Severus.  "I've tried everything I know to rouse you from your useless melancholy, and alas, I must use the last weapon at my disposal-a round of mindless capering and gibbering.  Quite cathartic, really."  He said this last with painful precision, and in his mind's eye, he envisioned the young Auror no doubt stationed at the receiver end, his eyes bulging in horrified incredulity at _that _pronouncement.  Another legend in the lengthy, and often lurid, Dumbledore mythos.

     He drew a deep breath, counted to three, and proceeded to sing as loudly as he could, bellowing a raucous tavern ditty about Miss Cassandra and her skill with a broom.  It was a resonating vibrato tenor, and it filled the room, curling in the corners and skulking over the floors like a precocious cat.  He stomped his feet and clapped his hands in time to the words, ignoring the grating twinges in his hips.  It was a glorious cacophony, and for a moment, he lost himself to it, let the stomps and meaty claps and off-key notes wash over his ears and sweep away the lead that had lodged in the hollows of his bones.  

     His feet lifted from the floor as though winged, and he found himself dancing across the floor, his robes snapping like banners caught in a lively spring breeze, flashes of phoenix plumage on the periphery of his vision.  He sang louder still, drawing air from the bottom of his diaphragm and yodeling about Cassandra and her affinity for a certain well-worn Nimbus 1998.  He forgot, for one sweet moment, _why _he was singing, and lost himself to the pure and simple joy of it.  One hundred years melted away, and he was fifty again, fifty and unburdened by a century of war and destruction.

     There was a sharp, urgent rap upon the door, and from behind the heavy oak came Dawlish's voice.  "Shacklebolt!  Is everything all right?  What in the name of Merlin is going on in there?"

     "Everything is splendid, Dawlish," Dumbledore called gaily, prancing with preternatural grace between the sofa and the hearth; he made sure to plant each step as closely as possible beside a Listening Charm.

     Kingsley went to the door and poked his head out, and as Dumbledore drew in another breath to renew the vaudevillian barrage, he heard the sussurating mutter of muffled conversation, smooth steel and jagged gravel.  After a few moments, Kingsley's head reappeared, and he closed the door.  He hesitated briefly, and then his deft fingers pinched the lock between their adroit grip and turned it.

     Safe from further interference, Kingsley sprang into action.  He, too, began a frenetic jitterbug across the floor, and as he stomped and pirouetted from place to place, his wand pointed at the forest of gently bobbing red markers.  When Dumbledore's hearty song crested, he would whisper, "_Fallero ferrere!", _and the bubble would disappear with a cheerful _pip_.

     "Headmaster, I must really ask you to stop this," Kingsley said somberly, but he was grinning broadly as he disabled another Listening Charm.

     "Don't be such a spoilsport, Mr. Shacklebolt," Dumbledore retorted jovially.  "No harm can come of it; indeed, I daresay it might even do a bit of good."

     The latter was wishful thinking.  Severus had not so much as twitched since this lunatic debacle had commenced.  He was still in the same position he had maintained since Fudge had ordered him confined here-ramrod-straight, hands locked over his knees, and eyes fixed on the opposite wall.

     _What do you see?_

     He thought he knew the answer to that.  Severus saw what they all saw when left with nothing to distract them from themselves.  He was reliving his sins one by one, watching them unspool in the relentless theatre of his mind, shuttered inside his impregnable citadel and driving himself mad with the bitter agony of hopeless recrimination.  

     Minerva had always wondered why he had offered a ridiculously young and wildly temperamental Severus a teaching position and Head of Houseship.  Foolhardy, she had told him, too much trust and responsibility for one so unproven, and she had been right.  She almost always was, but he thought that if she could see Severus now, lost and being slowly overcome by his pestilential demons, she would understand.  

     Teaching, and the all the requisite responsibility the position implied, forced him to look beyond his own problems, wrenched his focus from pointless navel-gazing to the broader horizon of the world around him, enabled him, much as he publicly disavowed any interest in doing so, to extend to others the protection he had been denied.  Professorial robes and a small, shining pin had been his wards against the perilous downward spiral from which he had been rescued, and now that these had been snatched from him, he was quietly giving up the fight.

     The thought settled over him, a suffocating woolen mantle, and sapped the strength from his bones.  The giddy, slightly delirious joy affected in him by the frantic whirling, stomping dance and the ribald song forsook him as swiftly as it had seized him, and its sudden absence made his head throb dully.  The hundred years he had left behind found him again and wrapped themselves around his knees, ankles, and the small of his back.  He longed to sit, to collapse upon the sofa and bury his head in his hands, but Kingsley was not yet done, and so he kept dancing, his feet heavy as iron pillars.

     "I really must ask you, Headmaster, to stop this unseemly capering," Kingsley called as he performed an ungainly arabesque over a cluster of the dwindling Listening Charms.

     Dumbledore hardly heard him.  He danced without knowing where he trod, moving on instinct.  Never had his failure been so plain to see as it was on Severus' slack face.  It wasn't even the carefully schooled blankness of a man living a dangerous double life.  It was just…nothing, bland putty stretched over a skull.  Everything that was Severus-his bile and bellicose fire, his stubborn, unquenchable pride-was gone.

     _One failure, one slight too many.  You've wondered how much it would take before he buckled.  You've watched the lines etch themselves deeper and deeper into the flesh around his eyes and the corners of his mouth.  You've watched him eat pudding and milktoast while his colleagues ate rack of lamb because his stomach was too unsettled from Cruciatus to tolerate anything else.  And yet you told yourself that it was all right, that he could take just one more lash, one more affront.  One more became ten, then twenty, and now you've lost count._

_     When was the first?  Can you recall?  Was it at fifteen, when he stood before you, white-faced with fury, and told you that James Potter and his friends, Minerva's cosseted darlings all, had turned him upside down and stripped him of his tattered undergarments, and you, knowing, the truth, seeing it in Lupin's downcast eyes, let them get away with it because to do anything else would mean stripping Lupin of the one bit of accolade he had ever received?  Was it when you sacrificed the dignity of one boy for the self-esteem of another?  _

_     Or was it a year later, when Severus came to you and told you that there was a werewolf on the grounds, and that Sirius Black, roguish, brash, best mate of James Potter, the Gryffindor Golden Child, had lured him to the creature's lair in an attempt to kill him?  And you knew it was true because you knew about Lupin, but you did nothing because to expel him would be a victory for all the close-minded Pureblood families who swore that only the untainted had a right to the magic that flowed through their veins.  So you swore him to secrecy under unspoken threat of expulsion.  To say so outright wouldn't have done at all.  Blackmailing the innocent wasn't the Gryffindor way.  So you bound him to you with the first of many dirty little secrets._

_     Which was it?  It doesn't matter, really.  What matters is that you never stopped after that.  You reasoned that since he had weathered one, he could weather others.  And when he came to you with blood in his teeth and slathered on his face like warpaint, you took him in as your indentured servant, and with every injustice, you told yourself it was his penance.  You felt no guilt when you, publicly and without preamble, wrested the cup from Slytherin and placed it in Gryffindor hands, and whatever doubts you had were snuffed out by the rationale-oh, how absurd a word-that Harry needed it more.  It was his childhood all over again.  Passed over for the sake of another._

_     Even then, with the fault lines growing ever wider, you didn't stop.  You couldn't by then.  It was almost compulsion, and because Minerva, always your rudder when you strayed from the course, did not protest, you told yourself that all was well, despite glaring evidence to the contrary.  You ripped the _Order of Merlin _from his grasp and showed him for a fool in front of Fudge, decimated his credibility, and now that has come back to haunt you._

_     You should have eased things then, but you didn't.  Not you.  You couldn't be wrong.  You were Albus Dumbledore.  So you invited Remus Lupin, his childhood enemy, to Hogwarts, and you asked him to brew a potion for a man he despised.  And because he loved you in his own odd fashion, he did.  Sometimes he brewed on his knees because he was too weak to stand.  You know this because you watched him once, crawling on all fours to the cauldron and trying not to cry out from the pain and fatigue.  But he brewed that potion, and it was perfect.  Just like always. _

_     And still there was no respite, no reprieve.  The Tri-Wizard Tournament, and an impostor revealed.  When Bartemius Crouch, Jr., under guise of Alastor Moody, tried to kill Harry, Severus was at your side, wand at the ready, and how did you repay him?  Why, you forced him to shake hands with a sworn enemy because you wanted your little ragtag coterie to be perfect, or at least maintain the illusion of perfection.  You couldn't leave well enough alone._

_     And what of this past summer?  You know how he spent it.  How much more of _that_ do you think he can endure?  Not nearly as much as you hope, as you need.  How long, if by some miracle he slips this inescapable noose, until he does not return from his nocturnal rendezvous, or returns to die at your feet?  It doesn't really matter, does it?  Because if he comes out of this, you will send him back, and you will keep sending him until there is nothing else to be had, until you have used him up.  That is the way of war.  One or the other, and if you must choose between him and Harry, there can only be one choice._

_     Always in the nick of time, you are, but not for him.  It's too late.  You've waited too long.  Your noblesse was legendary, and yet with him, you were too dear.  Too little, too late, and now look what you have done.  Stanhope fights for a man already dying._

     He wanted Kingsley to be done.  His knees were loosely bundled straw between thigh and ankle, and they would not support him much longer.  His ears were filled with thunder of blood, and from far away, he heard his own voice singing with manic gusto about the storied exploits of the voluptuous Cassandra.  The bawdy ballad had become an atonal, nightmarish dirge, the screaming confession of a man stretched beyond his tether.

_     Failed.  Failed.  I've failed._  

     The thought hounded him as he flapped and stomped like a seizuring heron before the fireplace, his eyes riveted to Severus' face.  Every line and groove in the expressionless alabaster visage was a wordless indictment against him, a testament to his carelessness.  He longed for him to sneer, to curl those thin lips into an expression of seething scorn.  He wanted him to snort and tell him that he was behaving like a fool, that his Gryffindor sensibilities had finally addled his mind.  He yearned for a glimpse of quintessential Severus, for a smoldering ember that would tell him hope was not lost, but there was only bleak nothingness.

     He nearly shouted when Kingsley tapped him on the shoulder.  He stopped his frantic fandango and staggered, his feet nearly tangling with one another.  He lurched to a nearby chair and sank into it.  

     "Yes, Kingsley?" he said when he had caught his breath.  One hand kneaded absently at a fading stitch above his right hip.

     "The Listening Charms have all been disabled, sir.  Are you all right?"  

     "I've been better," he murmured absently.  Then, in a brisker tone, before Kingsley could pursue that, "Will Fudge and the others realize what has happened?"  He reached into his robes and pulled out the slab of Medi-Chocolate, half-melted now by his exertions.

     Kingsley scratched one sparse eyebrow with a graceful index finger, wand gripped in one sweaty hand.  "I've essentially recorded over it, looped a continuous stream of silence and random clatter that repeats itself ad infinitum.  With any luck, they'll not catch the tampering."

     "Well done, Kingsley."

     "Thank you, Headmaster."  He inclined his head respectfully.

     _Perhaps if you had said "_well done" _to Severus just once, you could have spared yourself this terrible grief.  _He fought to stifle an agonized titter.  He had lost his mind.

     Kingsley's warm hand settled over his shoulder, a shoulder that suddenly felt fragile as dust beneath his robes.  

     "Headmaster?"

     Dumbledore took off his hat and ran his fingers through hair bleached white as cotton by the steady onslaught of years.  "I'll need a few minutes alone with Severus, if you please, Kingsley," he said quietly.  The gentle weight on his shoulder lifted as Kingsley withdrew his hand.  

"Of course, sir.  I'll examine the lavatory for any Charms I might have overlooked."  With a last skeptical glance at Severus, Kingsley disappeared into an adjoining room.

     There was a long, awkward silence as Dumbledore gathered his thoughts.  What to say?  How did he break through this impenetrable wall of silence?  He rubbed his aching knuckles.  Even with the fire in the hearth, it was still abysmally cold.  The thin lather of sweat he had worked up during his crazed jig was rapidly cooling, making the silk of his robes cling to his skin and faint tendrils of steam rise from his shoulders, a soul escaping the shorn bonds of its mortal housing.

     "That number drew considerably more applause at The Three Broomsticks," he said in what he hoped was sardonic levity.  Severus remained silent.

     He sighed and scrubbed his face with his hands.  "Severus, please.  I know things seem dire at the moment, and perhaps they are, but there is still hope."  Even to his own ears, the words were flat and unconvincing.  He tried another tack.  "Have faith, Severus.  You are not forgotten.  You have allies."  The figure on the sofa moved not a millimeter.

     "Merlin, Severus, I cannot help you if you will not allow it!" he cried in exasperation.  "Despite what you may think, I've not left you here to rot.  But things must be done carefully.  I'll be of no use to you locked away in Azkaban on charges of sedition.  Even I am not invulnerable, Severus," he finished quietly.

     _You've certainly let him and everyone else think so for all these years.  Why should he believe differently now?  Because it's convenient?  _

     He pushed the scalding thought away and pressed on.  "Have you let Fudge break you, Severus?  Has he managed, with his pomposity and alarming lack of common sense, what Voldemort, with all his torture, could not?  You are a far better man than he, so why do you surrender so easily?  If you do not fight, he will take your silence as a tacit admission of guilt."

     Black eyes looked blankly at the wall above and to the right of his head.

     Dumbledore buried his head in his stiff hands.  "Are you punishing me, Severus?" he moaned from behind them.  "Is this your vengeance for all my failures, all the things I let pass in the name of expediency, of advancing a higher goal?  Now that I have no power over you, you would have me pay for my misdeeds."  He laughed, a dry, brittle croak.  "I assure you, I know my sins, and they are legion.  Not least among them is my categorical failure where you are concerned."

     It happened without warning.  One moment he was slumped in a chair with his head in his hands, dry-eyed and weary, and the next he was weeping, great, silent sobs that wracked his thin, exhausted frame.  He rocked back and forth in the chair, breathing in hiccoughing, watery sobs.  He was too tired to deny his guilty grief, and too old and too wise to cling to useless pretension.  There were no students for whom he had to project the image of unshakeable strength.  There was only Severus, broken and silent upon his sofa, and if anyone understood the reason for the tears trickling down his cheeks, it would be him.  Alone with his most neglected pupil, he gave in to gnawing despair.

     Snape, perched upon the sofa and hunkered behind the battlements of his fortress, watched his Headmaster and mentor crumble beneath the incalculable weight of his grief in mute disbelief.  He had seen Albus cry only once before, upon learning of the Potters' deaths, and those had been restrained tears, blunted by shock.  This was different and infinitely more terrible.  This was raw and savage, from a deep wellspring he had never suspected.  They were the bitter tears of a man cornered at last by his demons and doubts.

     _He weeps for me.  Harder than he wept for his precious Potters.  _It was childish and ridiculous and selfish, but he could not help it.  James Potter had won at everything to which he set his sainted hand, and the fact that he had bested him at something filled him with heady satisfaction.  Even if that something happened to be the level of grief and guilt he had managed to heap upon the heart of Albus Dumbledore.

     He promptly despised himself.  Albus had given him a second chance, accepted him with all his faults and his scars.  Where others had seen an unsalvageable waste of flesh and sinew, the old man had seen a terrified, bewildered man clawing at a web of his own weaving, trying to escape before he was crushed by the darkness.  He had offered him an exit from the road to ruin, a chance for absolution before he met his end, and here he sat, gloating at the man's despair like an aesthetically pleasing Dementor.

     _Don't be a fool.  He mourns the loss of a tool._

     He snorted inwardly.  Bollocks.  As a tool, he was little better than useless.  He was being excised from the Dark Lord's inner circle with neat, ruthless precision, and soon, when the joy His Lordship took in watching him writhe and scream at his feet had waned, the last tenuous connection would be severed, and follower would become gross liability.  And liabilities to the great and glorious cause of Voldemort did not survive for long.

     _I suppose you think he loves you,_ sneered the cynical voice inside his head.

     _Of course not.  The man is a Gryffindor; futile teeth-gnashing and rending of the sackcloth is a prerequisite of the House.  Unfounded guilt is his birthright._

     The Headmaster's bout of weeping began to taper off, and from behind wrinkled, long-fingered hands came muffled, watery snorts, and Snape curled his lip in disgust.  It was unsettling to see him sniffling like a bereft pupil.  Another sin to lay at his own well-sullied feet.

     _Not yours alone.  Not this time.  That puling Potter brat and our esteemed Minister of Magic both have a hand in this._

Fudge and Potter.  His hands tightened around his knees in a vise grip at the thought of them.  Bile, warm and greasy, rose in his throat.  If the Headmaster was right, and there was one last miracle to be had in the cosmos, he would make certain they paid for this, for all that he had endured.  Dumbledore should not be in a chair, weeping for a man unworthy of his tears, and he should not be trapped in his own rooms like a dangerous beast, not when truly dangerous filth like Lupin was allowed to roam the streets.

     Oh, yes, he would avenge himself upon both of them, but for the first time since he had set eyes upon the damnable boy, Potter was not the one who made him grind his teeth in bilious rage.  Fudge had superseded him, usurped the honor he had been sure he would never bestow upon another.  It was Fudge he saw now when his eyes closed.  His florid, pudgy, sanctimonious face had etched itself into the waiting shadows behind his fluttering eyelids and emblazoned itself upon his retinas like the hazy afterimage left in the wake of lightning's eye-searing flash.  Not a moment passed when he did not see that reptilian, triumphant crescent of perfectly white teeth.  A politician's smile.  The smile he had worn as he ordered an Auror not long out of puberty to destroy his mother's china.

     The tinkling fullisade of shattering china filled his ears, and his lips pulled back from his teeth in a feral snarl that exposed glistening gums.  That would not go unpunished, even if there was no reprieve at the eleventh hour.  He would exact his revenge with his bare hands if need be, wring the impertinent youth's neck with his strong and supple fingers.  The Auror's life would not be the first he had snuffed between squeezing fingertips, and unlike the others, girls whose only sin had been to mock him, he would feel no guilt as the body dropped to the floor like a sack of wet grain.

     A deep sigh tore him from his reverie, and he scowled as the Headmaster.  It was disconcerting to see the man who had been his touchstone for so long reduced to sniveling impotence.  It shouldn't be, and it did nothing to settle his mind.  In fact, it infuriated him.  Why should Albus weep?  He was free to do as he chose.  No one would come to his chambers and riffle his things.  And no one would dare suggest Albus Dumbledore be stripped and subjected to gross bodily invasion by a prying, ruthless finger.

     "Such cheap emotional weaponry is beneath you, Headmaster," he snapped, and reached into his robes for a handkerchief.

     The Headmaster froze in the act of replacing his spectacles before his puffy eyes, and he looked up with exquisite, dreamy slowness.  He blinked, as though uncertain of what he had heard.

     "Severus?"  Full of desperate hope.

     He said nothing and held out his linen handkerchief.  He could not find it within himself to be moved by the pathetic joy radiating from the Headmaster's face.  He had served by his side long enough to know that he was a master manipulator, puppet master of a thousand pawns, and he used them as he saw fit.  

     The Headmaster took the proffered linen with trembling hands.  "Thank you."  He removed his spectacles and daubed at his swollen eyes.

     "Should I have been moved by your concern?" he asked, bored by the unseemly pathos that permeated the room like musk.

     Another sigh, this one tinged with impatience.  "I did not come here to wheedle myself into your scant good graces, Severus."  Dumbledore's hand disappeared into his robes and withdrew a slab of Medi-Chocolate.  He snapped off a piece and slipped it into his mouth.

     "Oh?" he replied, irked by equanimity in the face of his vitriol.  "Then to what do I owe the…pleasure of your visit?"  He laced _pleasure _with mocking sarcasm.

     The Headmaster remained unperturbed.  "To tell you that you are neither alone nor forgotten," he said softly.

     He snorted, ruing his decision to break his silence.  "How comforting.  I'll hold that thought dear when the festering lips of a Dementor cover mine."  He shifted on the sofa and stared at the uncharacteristically scuffed toes of his boots.

     "For Merlin's sake, Severus, stop this useless whinging," Dumbledore said sharply, his eyes suddenly hard as flint.  "What is happening to you is unjust, I'll not deny it, but you have contributed to your own noose just as much as I have.  You've shut us all out and turned us away.  Your walls are unbreachable, and most have wearied of trying to scale them."

     "Those walls have sustained me through years of your merciless penance," he hissed.

     "A penance for which you asked," came the even reply.

     He laughed, a choking, barking cry of bitterness.  "I should have known better.  I'd forgotten your penchant for moral expediency."  He was satisfied to see a flicker of shame cloud Dumbledore's face.

     "I have made many mistakes, and I regret them all," Dumbledore conceded, and steepled his fingers beneath his chin.  "Which is why I am trying so desperately to prevent another."

     "The premature loss of your pet reclamation project?" he said bitterly.

     There was a thoughtful silence, and then, "The loss of my friend."

     He stared at the Headmaster in dumb incredulity.  He could not believe what he had just heard, could not grasp the full meaning of it.  He had worn many labels over the course of his life-mistake, bastard, failure, git, murderer, monster-but friend had been beyond his scope of self-definition.  Even as a child and student at Hogwarts, he had been a solitary figure, permitting only the most formal and aloof of acquaintanceships.  Even his own Housemates had left him to his own devices, and he had found solace in his cauldron and his Dark magic.

     "Friend," he repeated, as though it were a word he had never heard before.  "A friend."

     "Yes, Severus.  My friend."  A gentle, knowing smile crept across the Headmaster's face.  "I'm sorry to disappoint you, but strictly as a professor, you've proven quite the inconvenience.  Your complaint dossier is rather prodigious."  The smile was wry now, fond.

     An unexpected snuffle of amusement escaped him, and the cold scrim of ice around his heart thawed the tiniest fraction.  

     _He lies.  He'll tell you whatever he has to in order to assure your unwavering docility.  He no more considers you a friend than does Lord Voldemort; you are a tool, and when you have served your purpose, this precious _friendship_ will dissipate like smoke in the wind.  Don't be taken in by such sentimental pap._

     Everything the voice said was true; painful experience had told him so, but sitting on his sofa, wearing robes that had last seen the school laundry three days ago, the tenacious survival instinct that had borne him through a misspent youth and a never-ending penance clung to the tantalizing thread of hope the Headmaster offered him.  

     "Ah, the young scholars of Hogwarts.  They must be capering in the corridors at my ignominious departure," he murmured.

     "Fewer than you surmise have found joy in your absence," said Dumbledore placidly.  

     Snape snorted and rolled his eyes.  "Please, Headmaster.  Given my present circumstances, diplomacy is a useless frippery.  I am well aware that three-fourths of the student body are eagerly awaiting news of my demise, and the quarter that finds the situation depressing does so only because of all inherent exigencies and their requisite implications.  The Gryffindors in particular must be on tenterhooks waiting to catch a glimpse of my dishonored corpse.  My head on a pike would do nicely."

     Dumbledore smiled, but his eyes were grave.  "Not all Gryffindors, Severus."

     "Is McGonagall knitting paisley socks with a fortuitous file inside?" he sneered.

     The Headmaster grimaced.  "I'm afraid not."

     Snape said nothing.  He knew very well that McGonagall was convinced of his guilt.  She had always been suspicious of him, sure that he was biding his time until he could betray them all to the darkness.  She watched him while he ate, waiting, perhaps, to see him slip a killing draught into the Headmaster's pumpkin juice.  

     "So long as she isn't helping to weave my noose," he murmured.

     "Hardly.  Indeed, I'm certain she would rather weave one for Cornelius Fudge," the Headmaster said drily, and a mischievous twinkle gleamed in his eyes.

     "Who, then, is my savior?  Granger, patron saint of the hopeless cause?"

      "Your cause is hardly hopeless, Severus," Dumbledore chided.  "But no.  Miss Granger is devoting her considerable energies to finding an antidote for the poison."

     "Then who-," he began, then trailed off.  A terrible possibility had begun to form in his mind.

     "Did you know, Severus, that a mongoose is the natural enemy of the serpent?"  Dumbledore stretched out in his chair and folded his hands across his abdomen.  He was watching him with a beguiling, thoughtful expression that he found unsettling.

     He shifted on the sofa, wrinkling his nose at the sour smell of stale sweat that drifted from his filthy robes.  "Thank you for the zoology primer, Headmaster, but what has that got to do with the dreadful supposition filling my mortified mind?"

     "Imagine how formidable an ally a mongoose would make."

     "Miss Stanhope is not a 'mongoose.'  She is a willful, irritating chit who takes far too much interest in my affairs," he snarled.  "She will be more hindrance than help."

     "She refused the implements I offered her yesterday in Potions," Dumbledore said quietly.

     "Yet more evidence of her stupidity," he muttered, unimpressed.

     "Stupidity?  Loyalty, Severus, and integrity, two qualities of which you are in dire need."  Dumbledore pulled a lemon sherbet from the folds of his robes.  He held it out.  "Sweet?"

     He curled his lip in a moue of disgust.  "No," he said shortly, and lapsed into a brooding silence.

     "She is all you have, Severus.  And she sees, doesn't she?"

     "More than she should.  More than is safe," he conceded, and kneaded his temples.

     "She will see her way through.  She will be your watcher in the night.  Trust in that.  She will be with you until the end, and so will I."  After a moment, Dumbledore stood.  "Kingsley?"

     The Auror immediately appeared from within the adjoining room.  "Yes, Headmaster?"

     "I think it is safe to assume that Professor Snape is hiding no contraband, and I must return to my office."

     "Very good, sir.  Allow me to escort you."  Kingsley strode to the door and opened it.

     "Thank you."  As the Headmaster stepped over the threshold, he turned to Dawlish, who was surveying him suspiciously from his post beside the door, and said, "Dawlish, a word, please?"  The door closed on Dawlish's grunted reply.

     He sat for a very long time after the Headmaster had gone, unable to digest what had happened.  His life was now in the hands of a fifteen-year old girl whom he had once despised and tried to crush beneath his unforgiving heel, a twisted, mercurial sibyl fashioned from the half-finished plans of the Fates.  The unlikeliest of champions.  He was doomed.

     And yet, he thought as he stripped off his stinking robes and headed for the lavatory, it was somehow fitting.  It would be his final penance, to have one of the hated children of the Lion as his would-be savior, the last insult from pernicious gods.

     _Except that you're not sure she _is_ a child of the Lion._

     He paused in unbuttoning his trousers, his brow furrowed.  No, he wasn't.  He hadn't been since that strange, illusive vision they had shared in the Potions lesson not long before Potter collapsed.  She was something else, a changeling who fit nowhere and everywhere, a lion, a raven, a badger.  A serpent. Whatever she was, she was now his only hope.  The world had gone mad.        

     He was halfway to the lavatory when he heard a muffled thump from behind the door to his chambers.  He froze, hands hovering over the tiny buttons of his linen shirt, and listened.  There was nothing-no voices, no thundering feet, no muted discord.  When a minute passed with no recurrence of the sound, he put it out of his mind and went to take a much-needed bath.


	38. Hogsmeade and the Dance of the Dragon

Chapter Thirty-eight

     Hogsmeade.  For Rebecca, raised and nurtured beneath the sterile fluorescent light of D.A.I.M.S. and told that magic was a tool to be used but never enjoyed, it was a wonderland, a panacea for her aching joints and perpetually scalded eyes.  Everywhere she looked were witches and wizards garbed in bright and merry robes, and the air hummed with the subtle crackle of magic as Charms flowed without restraint.  The fairy bells of the myriad shops tinkled incessantly as the happily buzzing throng of Hogwarts students trooped in and out clutching parcels and purse strings.  The atmosphere was light and buoyant, a welcome change from the somber pall that hung over the castle like an accursed mist.

     "Where are we going?" she asked as she trundled beside Neville, her lips barely visible over the Gryffindor scarf Winky had bundled around her neck as protection against the mid-November chill.  

     Neville shrugged, and a shimmering plume of breath whorled beneath his nostrils.  "No destination, really."  He shoved his mittened hands more deeply into the pockets of his robes.

     "Where do you want to go?" Seamus asked from beside Neville.  "Seeing as how we've got two hours before we have to check in with Professor McGonagall.  Is there anything you need?"

     She pursed her lips and flexed her stiff fingers inside the woolen mittens she wore over her hands.  "I was thinking of buying an owl.  Is there anywhere to buy one?"  She looked around at the shops, searching the age-blackened signs for evidence of a pet shop, postal office, or owl emporium.

     Seamus nodded and pointed down the street.  "There's a shop further down the way.  The old chap who runs it is a bit odd, but the prices aren't too bad, and most of the animals are in good shape."  He scratched absently at his cold-chapped cheek as he walked.

     "Are they expensive?" she asked.

     "Depends on the kind you're looking for," Neville told her.  "The small ones are cheap, but the bigger ones, the ones for transatlantic post, can be a bit steep."

     She winced.  "That's the one I need.  How expensive?  More than a hundred Galleons?"

     There was a strangled guffaw from Seamus.  "Not bloody likely.  With that much money, you could put a nice down payment on a flat."

     "Oh," she muttered, and despite the frigid air swirling around her cheeks, her neck prickled with embarrassed heat.

     "Don't you use Galleons back home?" he asked, and scuffed the toes of his shoes over the frozen ground as he walked.

     She shrugged.  "I guess D.A.I.M.S. uses them to buy supplies, but we don't live in an exclusively magical village, so we have to use Muggle currency when we shop."  

     "Really?  What's that like?"  Neville raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

     "Nothing exciting.  Paper and small coins."

     "I've seen it," Seamus said.  "My dad's a Muggle."

     "Oh?  What's he do?"  She had never thought to ask about Seamus' parents.

     "He's a postman."

     "And your mom?"

     "My mam," he corrected with a laugh, "is a witch.  She works at the Ministry."

     _The Ministry._  The words sent a surge of bitter bile into her throat, but she only said, "Must have been weird for your dad."

     "Gave him a nasty turn, all right, but he got used to it soon enough."

     "Can he see Hogwarts?"

     Seamus opened his mouth, then closed it again.  "I don't know.  I've never asked.  I suppose not.  I reckon he has to take mam's word that it's there."  His brow furrowed as he pondered the question further.  "Why do you ask?"

     "Oh, I just wondered," she said slowly.  "Both my parents are Muggles, so I was wondering if they would be able to see me graduate."

     Seamus looked at her askance.  "Graduate?  Do you mean, when you get your certificate?"  His eyes were dancing with blithe amusement.

     "Yes…I think," she answered, unwilling to show more befuddlement than was necessary.

          "Well, we don't really have a ceremony for that.  Silly tosh.  You get a paper in the post with your last marks, and that's that.

     She felt a guilty relief.  Her parents had shown very little interest in their only child since they had divested themselves of her on the front steps of D.A.I.M.S. five years ago.  They had left her there with her luggage and perfunctory kiss goodbye, and aside from a pre-printed Christmas card every December twenty-fifth, that was the last contact she'd had with them.  Her transfer papers with their hasty, smudged signatures had been mailed from home in a manila envelope, and they had not come to see her off at the U.S. Customs Portkey from St. Augustine to London.  She had made the journey alone, and she suspected that she would make the short crossing from pupil to an adult fumbling for her place in the world the same way.

     "What do you need an owl for?"  Neville asked.  "The school has plenty."

     She was absurdly grateful for the change of subject.  "I just thought it would be nice to have one of my own.  Something to keep me company now and then.  You know how it is, Neville.  You've got Trevor, and he's useless, isn't he?"

     "He is not," Neville retorted defensively.  "His croaking sends me straight off to sleep at night."

    "Funny that," said Seamus drily.  "It's always had the opposite effect on me.  Bloody thing sounds like rusty gate hinges.  Lost count of the number of times I've thought of throttling the little beast."

     "You wouldn't!" Neville said in scandalized horror.  

     "Wouldn't I?"  Seamus smirked.

     "Git," Neville murmured agreeably, and the three of them lapsed into a companionable silence.

     Happy as she was to be out with her friends, she could not help but feel a pang of guilt as she rolled along beside them, the grit from the street crunching beneath her spinning wheels like tiny bones.  She wasn't being entirely truthful with them, and though she was quite accustomed to telling boldfaced lies to the oppressive authority figures who made her life unspeakably dull, it was another matter altogether to lie to her friends, her comrades in arms, as it were.  It made her feel greasy, tainted, and shame tickled her throat like the first faint stirring of a long and unpleasant cough.

     _Except they're not your comrades in arms, not in this.  They can't be.  The prejudice runs too deeply in their blood.  You tell them what you need that owl for, and they'll both break their necks getting to McGonagall and the Headmaster with tales of your obvious mania.  This is the nasty business of being a hero, the side they don't tell you about on the enlistment form.  You've been lolling around for far too long, and it's time now to get this crusade off the ground._

_     Crusade is hardly the word for this.  More like suicide run._

_     Whatever this is, be it crusade or death march, there is no more time to waste on nail-biting and navel-gazing; stop whining and get on with it._

_     I don't know how.  I don't even know where to start._

_     Bollocks you don't.  You damn well do, or else you wouldn't be on your way to get an owl.  You're just afraid.  Afraid you'll make a mistake.  _

_     He'll die if I do._

     And he'll die just the same if you don't.  Hell, he might be dead already.  It's a risk you will just have to take.

Right though her grandfather's voice was, his harangue from beyond the pale did nothing to bolster her flagging confidence.  She still felt as unsettled and lost as ever, a blind child groping for the shape of something familiar.  Deciding to take on the Ministry of Magic and actually going about it were two entirely different beasts, and though she had been perfectly willing to undertake both tasks, she was no longer sure she could achieve the latter.

     It wasn't a question of sufficient will or desire-she brimmed with both.  But she had never been so tired.  Her eyes burned and throbbed, heated gelatin inside her face, and her bones creaked and popped like dry kindling inside her skin.  George, still wounded by their squabble a few days earlier, had even put aside his self-imposed edict of no more solicitous interference to ask her if she felt all right the evening before last, and though she had told him she was fine and brushed aside his concern with a flap of one bony hand, it had been obvious to anyone with a working pair of eyes that she was anything but.  Even Ron Weasley, absorbed in delicious fantasies of vengeance against "that bastard Snape," had taken notice of her haggard appearance and the bruised, swollen pouches beneath her eyes.

     The insomnia was crippling, har-de-har, and each night, she found herself staring listlessly at the shadow-swaddled canopy of her bed or thrashing in the grips of unremembered nightmares that left behind only the cold burn of tears on her cheeks.  It was a rare night that she did not rise before the sun and flee to the bathroom in an attempt to scour the lingering unease from her skin.  Most lessons were spent trying not to nod off in mid-lecture, and more than once, she had caught busybody McGonagall surveying her with surreptitious worry.

     The gnawing, rapacious hunger in her belly made things no better.  Her appetite had not returned since Professor Snape's absence, though her stomach growled incessantly for sustenance.  She wanted to eat.  The food looked and smelled delicious, and she salivated like a starving dog at the sight of it, but the instant she raised the fork to her lips, her eyes would drift to the empty seat at the High Table, the victuals turned to ash and gravel in her mouth, and her stomach spasmed with guilt and confusion.  So the food went untouched, and the hunger grew until she was dizzy with it.  Only Winky's theft of bread and weak broth from the school kitchens kept her from collapse.

     She needed to pull herself together, gather up her scattered, tattered courage, and form a plan of attack, which was why she had decided upon an owl.  She might not be able to depend on help from her Housemates at Hogwarts, but she _could _find help in other places, places over across the Atlantic, where the only prejudice was against those who walked about on two legs and lorded over those who could not, against curbs and stairs and broken elevators.  At D.A.I.M.S., where a certain level of narcissistic assholery was a prerequisite for survival, Slytherin was not an epithet.  Indeed, it held no meaning whatsoever.

     Jackson Decklan was the obvious choice.  Level-headed and crafty as a lord, he could be counted upon to use discretion and weigh options before rendering an opinion.  They had shared an affinity for Runes and Arithmancy, and the professors there had dubbed them the Beast With Two Brains for their cold-and some said vicious-dissection of problems and possible solutions.  If anyone was able to see through the soupy miasma of conflicting emotions and directionless flailing, it would be him.

     The only drawback was that transatlantic mail took eons to reach its destination and another eternity for the reply to find its way back.  While quaint under the best circumstances, Hogwarts' archaic inability to integrate magic with advanced Muggle technology was an enormous problem when it came to expediency and secrecy.  She would have loved to have access to the Floo network, but all the Common Room fireplaces were undoubtedly being surveiled by eagle-eyed Aurors, so hotwiring one illegally into the network, even for five minutes, was out of the question.  The professors' fireplaces were on the network, but she would wager every Knut in her vault that Fudge was monitoring them as well, and even if he weren't, she wasn't about to go traipsing to McGonagall's chambers and ask if she could use her Floo connection to conduct covert and possibly treasonous activities on behalf of one Professor Snape.  The woman would swallow her tongue.

     So the owl post it would have to be, and in the meantime, she was going to launch a clandestine offensive of her own, start the cautious and painstaking process of uncovering the truth.  The first order of business was to begin sorting what she knew from what she didn't.  After that, she would need to find the people with the keys and various pieces of the puzzle and coax the knowledge from them by hook or by crook.  It was, as Jackson would have told her, time to "roll dem bones and make the runes speak."

     _Easier said than done.  Have better luck making a stone scream._

That wasn't much of an exaggeration.  The Aurors were everywhere, and asking pointed questions about what had happened to Saint Harry, no matter how discreetly, was bound to attract their notice.  So paranoid were they that they had insisted on accompanying the students to Hogsmeade, as though they expected the bedraggled and confused pupils to organize an underground resistance movement over butterbeers and sweets from Honeyduke's.   

     Most of them were hovering around the sullen and silent Slytherin students like carrion fowl.  Draco Malfoy was being tailed by no fewer than six badly disguised Aurors, and now and then, one of them would stop and mutter not very inconspicuously into the sleeve of his robes. 

     She leaned over to Neville and lowered her voice so as not to be heard.  "Do you suppose he really thinks he's fooling anyone?"

     Neville cast a surreptitious glance at the Auror, who was pretending to linger over a pot of wilted, desiccated poppies perched forlornly on the window eave of a nearby shop.  Now and then, the Auror inched forward to keep pace with Draco, Crabbe and Goyle, who were strolling haughtily through the crowded street, roughly elbowing anyone who dared impede their progress.

     "He's barmy if he does," Neville said at last.  "My Gran could do a better job of it really."

     "They're not too bright if you ask me," Seamus chimed in, and nodded in the direction of another Auror, who was making a ludicrous production of reading the newspaper as he followed half a dozen paces behind the trio of Slytherins.  

     Rebecca stifled a snigger when she realized that the Auror, in a fit of creativity, had gouged two ragged eye holes into the thin paper.  "Not a bit obvious, them," she said drily.

     Seamus snorted.  "That's nothing.  Before we left the castle, I noticed one walking about with a pair of earmuffs he'd enchanted to overhear conversations.  Looked ridiculous with a pair of great glowing muffs wrapped around his head."

     She giggled, but said nothing.  She was too busy watching Draco as he sauntered ahead of her with his cronies.  His platinum-blond hair was white fire in the chill, drab sunlight, and it made her eyes water to look at him.  His stride was a feline, lingering swagger, and she knew immediately that he knew he was being pursued.  What was more, he knew and didn't care.  He walked and talked and sneered at those around him as he had always done, in quiet defiance of prying, quelling eyes.

     She felt an unwilling stab of admiration for him.  The other pupils fell silent when the mute, forbidding figures of the Aurors drew near, shrank closer to their companions and formed a meek herd of thin-lipped, frightened gazelles, eyes darting from side to side as they searched for escape from interminable scrutiny, but Draco refused to be cowed.  His arrogance afforded him a power and confidence beyond the reach of his peers.  The blood in his veins, cultivated by ten centuries of carefully refined breeding and an equal measure of indoctrination superseded the paltry, superficial authority of those pursuing him like a pack of slavering dogs, and she suspected he would be damned to unending perdition before he bent to their will.

     _Smug little bastard, _she thought, but the perverse admiration refused to be dislodged, and she smirked when Draco proclaimed, quite loudly, that the Aurors behind him were making an awful business of covert observation, and would they please refrain from coming too close, as he was highly sensitive to the smell of Mudblood offal.

     "Sodding little prat," grumbled Seamus, and he shot him a venomous glare.

     "He'll get what's coming to him," she said, though she was trying desperately not to laugh at the goggle-eyed surprise stamped on the pursuing Aurors' faces.

     She was startled to a sudden stop when Draco suddenly whirled to face her, his pale, patrician face a mask of pained hauteur.

     "Find something funny, do you, you wretched little Mudblood?" he asked coolly, and she was not at all surprised to see that he held his wand in one elegant, long-fingered hand.

     "Yes, actually," she said.  "Though I daresay it's not what you'd expect."  She was dizzy with adrenaline, and there was a delicious tightening in her groin, as though invisible fingers had caressed forbidden flesh.  She shifted in her chair and fought the urge to dissolve into helpless cackles.

     "Here, now," said the Auror who had been reading the paper, and he stepped forward with his wand at the ready.

     Rebecca snorted, and her eyes narrowed in contempt.  She didn't want help, especially not from the likes of _him._  This, whatever it was, was between her and Draco, and should it come to wandpoint, she was perfectly willing to accept the consequences, even if it meant a trip to the infirmary.  In fact, she wanted the momentary, blazing color with which a duel would infuse her life, longed for the surge of cruel magic through her frozen fingertips.  Anything to break the wilting monotony her days had become.

     _Come on, Draco.  Give me what we both want._

But Draco was regarding her with a strange, almost incredulous expression, and a cold smirk flitted across his face.  He twirled his wand in graceful, lissome fingers.  On either side of him, his faithful lackeys exchanged bewildered glances over the top of his head, temporarily unmanned by his abrupt change in demeanor.  Even the newspaper-reading Auror looked nonplussed.  He lowered his wand, then raised it again and cleared his throat.

     "Enough," the Auror said gruffly.  "Break it up."

     Draco rolled his eyes.  "It's a tete a tete, not a ménage a trois, you dolt," he drawled.  Crabbe and Goyle guffawed obediently, and the latter cracked his large, square knuckles with ominous relish.

     Flustered, the Auror lowered his wand again.  "You're blocking the street," he protested weakly, and fell into a sullen silence.

     Draco paid him no mind and took a lazy step forward.  "Oh?  Would I find it amusing, Stanhope?"  Her name was a beautiful epithet in his mouth.

     She felt her own mouth stretch into a sardonic, knowing smile.  "I think you would," she said coyly, an unspoken invitation.  There was a disbelieving grunt from Goyle, and Crabbe's thick brow knitted in ponderous, hopeless contemplation.

     Draco raised a delicate eyebrow in surprise.  "Don't flatter yourself, Stanhope.  There is nothing a deformed, Mudblood freak like you could say that I would find worthy of my time."  He pocketed his wand with thoughtless ease.

     "I think there is."  She smiled more widely still.

     His lip curled in haughty disdain, and his grey eyes flashed, flawed quartz in his porcelain face.  "Your opinion is irrelevant, and one day you will learn that lesson, Mudblood.  Most painfully, I hope."  He turned on his heel and started away.

     She would never fully comprehend why she did it.  Perhaps weariness and malnutrition had clouded her better judgment and eroded her sense of self-preservation.  Maybe she was simply mad with the need for a respite from the bland, monochrome colors of her insulated world, or maybe she just wanted to touch him.  Whatever the reason, she rolled forward and placed her icy hand upon his shoulder.

     Three things happened in the space of seconds.  The Auror who had been watching the conversation with ill-disguised unease stepped forward with a pre-emptive shout.  Behind her, Seamus bellowed something that sounded suspiciously like, "Oi, bollocks!" and lunged for the handlebars of her chair.  The plaintive scrape of his nails against cold plastic as they missed their grip was preternaturally loud in the stunned stillness.  And Draco Malfoy whirled with the speed of a cornered asp and caught her wrist in an agonizing, iron grip.

     It hurt; it was, in fact, almost excruciating, but she found herself laughing, her cadaverous face tilted toward Malfoy's chin, her mouth opened in a white-plumed gape.  It was suicide to laugh when he was so furious, but she couldn't help it.  The explosion of color that illuminated her world the moment his fingers clamped over her bony wrist was absolutely exhilarating, and her heart, which for the past week had been little more than a leaden ball inside her chest, was racing, soaring with a nearly orgasmic euphoria.

     _Touching the forbidden.  If only they could see what I see_, she thought giddily, and laughed louder still.

     The colors were fever-bright, piercing as the last death throe rays of a supernova sun, and she squinted against them and smiled.  Draco's skin was flawless ivory, and this close she could see the faint stippling of platinum hair beneath his nose.  Fury had flushed his cheeks rose, and as she drew in a breath to laugh again, she smelled spiced rosewater.  She closed her eyes and let it wash over her.

     The hand gripping her wrist tightened its hold, and in her heightened state of awareness, she distinctly heard her fragile sparrow's bones creak and grind dangerously.  Then, shrill as the cry of a banshee, Seamus' outraged bellow.

     "Let go of her, you dirty, poncy prat!"

     Despite the sharp, jagged pain radiating from her tortured wrist into her elbow in steady, nauseating waves, she giggled, a carefree, absurdly merry sound amid the threatening chaos.  From the corner of her eye, she could see the poppy-inspecting Auror marching resolutely toward the fray, wand outstretched in an authoritarian point, blue robes snapping in crisp affront with every step.

     "Oh, thank you, Malfoy," she wheezed through a snort of pained mirth.  "You have no idea what you've just done."

     Beautiful fingers bit into her numbing, puffy flesh, the mitten she wore scant protection from his ruthless grip, and his lips curled back from his perfect, pearldrop teeth.  "Never put your filthy, worthless hands on me, you disgusting freak," he hissed through gritted teeth.  He began to push her wrist backward with casual sadism.

     "Go on," she grunted, "break it.  "Make the bones grind and pop.  You think it will sound like an icicle snapping from the eaves?"  She grimaced as a tendon in her wrist gave an ominous twang and sent a bright flare of pain through her frozen forearm.

     "You're diseased _and_ mad," he snarled.

     "Maybe," she agreed amiably.  She certainly felt mad.  "But there are two things I know for certain."

     "Oh?"  Another painful wrench of her wrist.  Someone-Seamus probably-swore, and Goyle, perhaps realizing that the Aurors were going to set upon their pampered charge any moment now, leaned over and muttered thickly into Draco's finely sculpted ear.  He was silenced with a disdainful glare from his benefactor.

     "Oh, yes," she said, vaguely aware that she had lost the feeling in her fingers.  "The first is that if you break my wrist, you'll be giving those clueless bastards a reason to step on your miserable little throat."  Her eyes darted to the rapidly advancing Aurors, and her blue lips curved into a contemptuous, reptilian sneer.

     He squeezed her trapped wrist, and black irises of pain bloomed behind her eyes.  "And the other?"  He jerked her forward until her lap belt bit into her scrawny upper thigh with tiny, sharp teeth. 

     "Whoremaster!" screamed Seamus at the top of his voice, and the enraged oath drew the attention of several passing Hogwarts pupils, who stopped to watch the fray, clustered in tight, jostling, craning groups at a safe distance.  A Ravenclaw fourth-year took one look, spun on her heel, and sprinted toward the Three Broomsticks, going, no doubt, to fetch Professor Flitwick.

     An Auror had at long, blessed last reached them, and he seized Draco by the scruff of his robes and yanked him roughly away from her.  "That will be quite enough of that, Mr. Malfoy," he snapped.  "We will be paying a visit to Professor McGonagall since your Head of House is currently…indisposed."  His mouth twitched in ill-concealed glee.  "I daresay you are in a great deal of trouble."  He turned to look at her.  "Are you all right?" he asked.

     She took a ragged breath and nodded.  Her offended hand lay twitching and throbbing in her lap, and she bit her lip as the blood began to flow sluggishly into her deadened fingertips and infuse them with reluctant life.  Already the flesh around her wrist was turning a disquieting plum.

     "You should get that seen to," commented the poppy-inspecting Auror, who was still holding Seamus by the collar of his robes.  He sounded indifferent, almost bored.

     _That explains why Draco isn't sporting a fat lip and a crown of knots, _she thought, and snorted.  To the Auror, she said, "Yes, sir, I will.  Thank you."

     "And you," grumbled the Auror who had seized Draco, "are coming with me.  I would say I'm surprised at your behavior, but given your Head of House, I'm afraid that would be stretching the truth.  I'll be sure your father hears of this."  He turned and dragged Draco away, leading him by the elbow.  Crabbe and Goyle followed in his imperious wake like poleaxed bison.

     "Draco," she called after them as they trudged toward The Three Broomsticks, "don't you want to know the other certainty I've come to understand?"  Her hand spasmed painfully in her lap, and she bit back a groan, lest an Auror should take a renewed interest in her injury and send her back to the castle before her investigation even began.

     Draco, stiff-backed and sullen beside the Auror, halted abruptly, and though the Auror prodded him none too gently with the tip of his wand, he refused to budge.  Instead, he pivoted on his heel and stared at her with a flat, inscrutable expression.  

     "What do you know?" he spat.

     The Auror tugged impatiently on his elbow.  "Come along, you," he demanded.

     Draco ignored him and repeated the question as though he had all the time in the world.  "I said, what do you know?"

     "You see.  You watch."  She savored each word as it passed her lips, shivered at the unexpected warmth they sent into her throat and the shriveled pit of her stomach.

     For a moment, the surprise on his face was so complete that it was comical.  His eyes widened, and the rosy flush with which his anger had endowed him ebbed away and left in its place an alarming pallor.  Then he recovered himself and passed a well-manicured hand over his windswept hair in dainty, fluttering strokes.

     "I don't know what you're on about.  You're barking," he said smoothly, and with that, he at last allowed himself to be led away.

     "Yes, you do," she said softly, so that only she could hear.  Then her wounded wrist sent out a sizzling pang of distress and drove all thoughts of cryptic word games from her mind.  "Shit," she muttered, and turned to face Seamus and Neville. 

     "Are you all right?"  Neville hurried over, and Seamus trailed behind him, straightening his robes amid a muttered litany of dark imprecations.

     She gave her fingers a tentative wiggle and hissed as a bolt of pain clawed its way from thumb to forearm.  "I don't know.  I think he sprained my wrist.  Little bastard."

     In truth, she was not angry with Malfoy.  Instead, she was filled with an inexplicable gratitude and a dim glee.  In the seconds before the Auror had waded in and separated them, she had seen the fulfillment of her closely guarded, lovingly nurtured hope.  His haughty grey eyes had been home to perfect hatred and seductive revulsion.  She had made him see her as more than a convenient repository for his elegant loathing, and he despised her for it.

     _He hates me, he hates me_.  A glorious corruption of a young girl's whimsical love chant.  She could not have been prouder.  It was grudging affirmation of her existence, whether he intended it or not.

     "Why are you smiling?"  Neville was regarding her with an endearing expression of unease, as though he thought she might suddenly leap upon him or start speaking in tongues.

     "Was I?" she asked innocently.  She gingerly peeled the mitten from her wounded hand.

     "Yes.  It was like you were a million miles away."  He peered at her hand.  "I reckon we should get you to Pomfrey."

     She bristled immediately.  "I don't want to go to Pomfrey.  I'll be fine."  The impact of her fervent declaration was undermined by a brilliant flare of pain from her aggrieved wrist, and she winced.

     "Yes, you're brilliant," Seamus observed drily.  "That's why your fingers are swelling like cocktail sausages."  He gestured at her hand, and she was dismayed to see that they were indeed nearly twice the size they should have been.

     "It's not that bad," she muttered unconvincingly, and tried her best to hide her hand in the folds of her robes.  She was rewarded with another starburst of bright, glassy pain.

     "The hell it isn't," Seamus said baldly.  "I don't care if you want to see Pomfrey or not; you're going."

     "I am not," she said, narrowing her eyes at him.  "I need an owl."

     Neville sputtered in exasperation.  "An owl?" he repeated incredulously.  "Your fingers are turning a royal shade of blue, and you're worried about getting an owl?"

     "I need an owl, and I don't know when I'll have another chance to find one," she said obdurately.

     Seamus planted his feet and crossed his arms.  "You are being ridiculous, and you are going to the Hospital Wing right now."

     She shook her head and dug in her heels.  If she allowed them to chivvy her back to the castle for medical attention, her plans to help Professor Snape would be set back by several weeks, and that was time she could not afford.  She had wasted enough time on pointless dithering.  It was now or never.  Her injured hand would have to wait.

     "Sorry, Seamus, no can do."  She calmly reached over and turned off her chair.

     So there they stood, staring at one another through the ephemeral haze of spent breath.  Most of the gawking students had long since moved on to other diversions and pursuits, but a few paused in their stroll to take in the bizarre sight of three Gryffindors sizing one another up like young rams preparing to do battle.  A fifth-year Hufflepuff settled herself into a comfortable crouch to watch the proceedings, sucking absently a neon green lolly that still bore the Honeyduke's sticker.

     Seamus lowered his head, an impatient bull about to charge, and scraped his toes furiously into the hard-packed dirt of the street.  "Have you cracked?" he asked matter-of-factly, and spat in the dirt at his feet.

     "No."

     He looked up at her.  "Then why are you being so pig-headed about this?  Madam Pomfrey won't hurt you."  

     She shifted uneasily in her chair, unsettled by the intensity of his gaze.  "I know she won't, but I just can't."

     "Why not?"

     "Wait a minute," Neville cut in, alarmed realization flooding his face, "does this have anything to do with Snape?"

     "Snape?  What about him?" Seamus demanded sharply, and his eyes narrowed to match her own.

     _Dammit, Neville, you and your big mouth, _she thought viciously, and spared him a smoldering sidelong glance.  "It has nothing to do with Professor Snape," she said tersely.

     "Then stop this nonsense and go to the Hospital Wing," Seamus snapped.

     "No."

     He swore under his breath.  "Right.  If you won't come willingly, then I'll round up Fred and George, and the four of us will drag you kicking and screaming.  Won't we, Neville?"  He looked to the other boy for affirmation.

     Taken by surprise, Neville shuffled from foot to foot, a miserable flush staining his neck and cheeks.  He cleared his throat and shot her a dubious, stricken look.  "Erm, r-right," he stammered.

     "You see?" Seamus crowed triumphantly.

     She sighed in rueful resignation.  "Yes, I see," she said quietly, and reached for her wand.  "But if you want me to go, you'll have to duel me."

     Seamus guffawed.  "You can't be serious."  His eyes were suddenly round as saucers inside his face.

     "I don't want to be."  She gripped the shaft of her wand in numb, sweat-slicked fingers and prayed she would not have to raise it.

     "Seamus," Neville said, stepping forward with hands spread in supplication, "let her be.  We've got to check in with McGonagall eventually, and you know she'll make her go."  His eyes darted nervously between Seamus and her, bright with consternation.

     Seamus rounded on him, and Rebecca relaxed.  She had no real desire to engage Seamus in magical fist-to-cuffs in the middle of Hogsmeade, if for no other reason than it would bring the Aurors running.  Besides, when he wasn't being an interfering worrywart, she liked him.  He was wry and kind, and he was always among the first to spring to her defense whether she needed defending or not.  She would prefer not to spar with anyone if it could be helped.  It would only make things that much harder.

     "Have you lost your mind?" Seamus was asking Neville in outraged disbelief.  "It's an hour and a half before we've to report to McGonagall again.  It'll be useless by then; she can barely lift it now."  He jabbed a finger at her hand, which was turning an unmistakable shade of purple.

     "Yes, but we can't just carry her off," Neville replied.  "She can be completely barmy if she wants to," he said simply.

     Despite the pain in her wrist and fingers, Rebecca howled with laughter.  "Touche, Neville," she chortled.  "Oh, Jesus."  She swiped at her streaming eyes with her good hand.  After a moment of stunned silence, Neville joined her, planting his pudgy hands on his knees and hooting.

     Seamus boggled at both of them, his hands fisted on his hips.  "You're both nutters," he said flatly, "absolutely raving."  His chest heaved with a long-suffering sigh.  "Well, you two can do as you like, but I'll have no part in this foolishness.  I'm going to find Dean.  I'll see you lot at dinner."  With a grim, tight-lipped smile and a half-hearted wave, he turned and strode in the direction of Zonko's Joke Shop.

     "Well, that went well," Neville said somberly, and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his robes.

     "Most excellent," she agreed drily, and snorted.

     "Would you have done it?" he asked quietly, and studied the ground.  "Dueled Seamus, I mean."

     She thought for a moment.  "Yes.  I wouldn't have had a choice."  She ran a clumsy hand through her hair.  "No choice at all."

     He lifted his gaze from the ground, and his eyes searched her face, flitted from chapped tip of nose to jut of chin as though they were looking for some unseen fault or carefully concealed deceit.  "It's not really about the owl, is it?" he said shrewdly.

     She kept her face a practiced blank.  "No."  She did not elaborate.

     "Is it about S-,"

     She held up a silencing hand.  "Not another word, Neville.  Not one.  Just leave it alone."

     "I reckon we'd better see to that owl, then," he said softly, and started down the street again.

     "So we'd better," she murmured, and followed him in watchful silence.

     While Rebecca was searching for the perfect owl in a dingy, ramshackle pet shop, Albus Dumbledore was staring across his desk at Cornelius Fudge, who was beaming at him with an expression of malignant glee.  Though he was outwardly composed, he longed to wrap his hands around the Minister's punctilious neck and squeeze until his gimlet eyes bulged.

     "What brings you here today, Cornelius?" he asked politely.

     "Well, you see, Headmaster, I've been hearing the most remarkable news."  Fudge folded his stubby fingers over his stomach and continued to beam.

     "Oh?"  Dumbledore reached sedately for a sherbet lemon and said nothing further.

     Fudge fussed for a moment with the sleeve of his robes.  "Yes.  It seems you have not yet appointed an interim Head of Slytherin House," he purred coyly.

     _Ah, I thought we would come to that.  _"No, I haven't.

     "Why ever not?  If I am not mistaken, you have another-,"

     He held up an admonitory hand before the Minister could continue.  "Yes, I do.  However, I am not comfortable appointing them to that position, as there could be problems when Severus returns."

     Fudge arched one grey eyebrow and snorted.  "'When Severus returns.'  Bit optimistic, wouldn't you say?"

     "Not at all."

     "Merlin, Albus, be sensible," Fudge snapped.  "He's as guilty as sin, and you know it.  The only thing he will be returning to is the earth from when he came."

     "Until that is a certainty, I cannot agree.  As it is, Slytherin has managed itself remarkably well in the absence of a Head."

     "Remarkably well?" Fudge repeated softly, as though he had just been told the earth was made of cheese.  "You've taken leave of your already dubious senses," he declared.  "Since we've hauled their exalted Head away, they've run amok.  Scuffles in the corridors, in the classrooms.  One of my Aurors broke up a fracas during the Hufflepuff Quidditch practice last evening when the Slytherin Beaters arrived and tried to use several Hufflepuff players as impromptu and rather unwilling Quaffles.  Nothing more severe than a few lumps and bruises, thank Merlin, but clearly the Slytherins are out of control.

     "Scuffles among Quidditch teams are quite common, Cornelius.  They happen every year."

     "Maybe so, but how do you explain Millicent Bulstrode dangling a first-year Gryffindor over the balustrade of the fifth-floor stairs by her ankles?  Rough horseplay?"  Fudge gave an ugly snigger and tugged indignantly on the midriff of his robes.

     Dumbledore took off his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers.  Much as it pained him to admit it, Fudge had a point.  The Slytherins _were_ spiraling out of control.  Troublemaking and occasional discord were a hallmark of the House, part of the legacy from their Dark and rebellious founder, Salazar Slytherin, who had driven his ordered colleagues to terrified distraction with his constant plotting, but of late, their chicanery had taken a decidedly darker turn.  Gone were the venomous catcalls and sneers and harmless, if painful, thumpings in the corridors, and in their stead were thinly veiled threats and Dark hexes that trod the uneasy line of legality.  Their fury at the world, long nursed within their breasts, was latent no more.  It had at last bubbled to the surface, a festering boil denied the soothing, cleansing scrape of the lance, and now they were dealing with the consequences.

     _Well, what did you expect?  Every black and morbid fantasy they have ever entertained is coming to pass before their very eyes.  The Ministry, or Cornelius, if you want to be truthful about it, in his haste to restore his flagging standing in the court of public opinion, has trampled their civil liberties into dust beneath his well-polished heel, and whatever kernel of respect for authority we have managed to drum into their suspicious heads has been crushed beyond resuscitation._

     He let his eyes drift to the tattered Sorting Hat sitting upon the highest shelf of the bookcase that ran the length of the left wall.  Its rend sagged toothlessly, a thin wisp of fabric trailing from one side of the gash like the orphaned nerve ending of a missing tooth.  Ever since the Tri-Wizard Tournament, the Hat had been carping about the need for House solidarity in the face of the coming calamity.  Despite shifted eyes and stricken murmurs immediately following its sage pronouncement, most students had forgotten its warning soon enough, dismissed it in favor of the safer, more comforting lullaby of Quidditch and Hogsmeade, and the heady, glycerin glimmer of adolescence.  

     He and the rest of the staff had paid heed, of course, but the admonitions of the old were dismissed as muddle-headed paranoia by prosaic youth, and so all they could do was hope and pray that reason and reality would assert itself before it was too late.  Now Fudge and his minions had ensured that the feeble hope of unity had failed, and nothing he or any of the others could say would change that.

     "The Slytherins are unsettled, Cornelius; all the students are.  They've always been the most volatile of Hogwarts pupils, and with their parents inculcating them against the evils of a Muggleborn-tolerant government, it's hardly surprising to see an escalation of hostilities."

     "An escalation of hostilities?  You talk as if this were a war."  Fudge's eyes narrowed to glittering slits.  "The stories their parents tell them might be the least of their worries.  These students must be brought to heel."

     "They are students, Cornelius, not malingering dissidents.  I can see no harm in taking a few more days to appoint someone to the position," he said calmly.

 "There is a great deal you have refused to see when it comes to your pet Death Eater, Albus.  I had hoped you would act reasonably, but I'm afraid you leave me no choice."  Fudge rose with an insincere sigh of regret.  

     "Choice?"

     "You have forty-eight hours to place that cherished pin-," he pointed at the silver and jade serpent lying docilely atop a stack of parchment, "-in the hands of someone who can lend it suitable honor and dignity, and appoint an interim Head of House.  If you don't, I shall appoint one for you, someone more amenable and accommodating to the wishes of the Ministry."  He smiled thinly.  "And Merlin knows, we wouldn't want to see it end up in the hands of someone unworthy."

     "No, indeed," he said blandly.

     Fudge left without another word, and when the door had closed on his pompous swagger, Dumbledore sighed and reached out to pick up the small pin.  The jade eyes shone with contemptuous defiance, and the dainty silver fangs glinted with the promise of cruel retribution, but their promise was empty without the stern, stiff line of Severus' brutally starched collar behind it.  He closed his fingers over it and invited the tiny snake to strike, but there came no castigating bite.

     _Forty-eight hours to place that pin in the hands of someone who will lend it suitable honor and dignity._  Fudge's words reverberated inside his head and in the stillness of the room.  How vague.  How brilliantly vague.

     _Speak in haste and repent in leisure_, he thought for no reason at all, and smiled.  

     After a moment, he replaced the pin atop its nest of parchment, picked up his quill, and glanced at the hourglass.  Just past one o'clock.  Four more hours until the pupils returned from Hogsmeade.  With practiced patience, he pulled a stack of disciplinary reports toward himself and pretended to be interested.


	39. The Three Broomsticks

Chapter Thirty-Nine

     Forty minutes after setting off for the pet shop, Rebecca and Neville were squeezed together at a table in The Three Broomsticks, a caged owl hooting noisily at her feet.  Professor Flitwick had been waiting for them, and now he stood beside Rebecca on the points of his toes and peered anxiously at her swollen hand.

     "Oh, dear," he murmured, and gave it an experimental prod with the tip of his wand.  He grimaced at her ill-concealed flinch.  "Quite tender, is it?"

     "Yes, sir," she said.

     "Well, I'm hardly a Mediwizard, but I'd say it's sprained.  Let's see now…," he tapped his chin thoughtfully for a moment.  "Yes, yes, indeed."  He pointed his wand at her hand.  "Hold steady now.  "_Curare mano!"_ he squeaked.

     She tensed in anticipation of discomfort, but none came.  Her hand was enveloped in the swirling silver light from the tip of Flitwick's wand, and it felt as though it had been plunged into a vat of local anesthetic.  One moment her fingers were throbbing miserably in time with her heartbeat, and the next her hand dangled uselessly from her wrist.  She tried to move it and found that she could not.  It was as if it had been severed from her body by an invisible scalpel.

     "Erm, Professor," she began uneasily, but Flitwick merely beamed at her.

     "Not to worry, Miss Stanhope.  The numbness should only last twenty minutes or so, and when sensation returns, your hand should be good as ever.  Though if you'd be more comfortable, I'm certain Madam Pomfrey would be glad to examine it."  He slipped his wand inside his robes.

     "Thanks, Professor."

     "Not at all, Miss Stanhope," he said cheerfully, and turned to go.  He had scarcely gone two steps when he stopped and turned to face her again.  "Dear me, I almost forgot."  He rummaged through the pockets of his robes, and after a few moments of patient search, he produced a neatly folded piece of parchment and held it out to her.  "Here you are."

     She took it from him with a faint scowl.  "What is it, sir?"

     "Regrettably, I must cancel our appointment tomorrow, so I took the liberty of copying the Charms the Headmaster requested you learn.  They should make your task much easier.  I've always thought those pitch stairs a trifle steep," he said with a mischievous gleam in his eyes.  "Now I must be off.  Now that McGonagall has marched the unfortunate Mr. Malfoy back to the castle, I must see to the students checking in."  

     "Yes, sir.  Thank you for the Charms," said Rebecca.

     "My pleasure, Miss Stanhope."

     "Erm, Professor?" Neville ventured timidly.

     "Yes, Mr. Longbottom?"  Flitwick raised one untidy eyebrow.

     "Is Professor McGonagall angry with us?"  

     He squirmed furiously in his chair, and Rebecca was reminded of the Potty Dance, the bizarre and heroically inelegant dance of small children and the incontinent whenever demands on the bladder became too great.  She fought to suppress a snigger and studied the pocked and knobbled tabletop in front of her.

     Now both of Flitwick's eyebrows were raised in surprise.  "Angry at you?  Whatever for?  No, no, Mr. Longbottom, I should say not.  Indeed, she seemed oddly radiant when the Auror explained the circumstances.  The same could not be said for Mr. Malfoy, however."  He shook his head ruefully.  "I daresay _he's _in a spot of trouble."

     "Good," muttered Neville.

     "Now, Mr. Longbottom, it's most unbecoming to revel in the misfortunes of others," chided Flitwick, but there was a mutinous twitch at the corners of his mouth.  "Now I must be off."  His eyes darted to the teachers' table, where an impatient gaggle of students was waiting to have their names checked off the roll.  He turned to go.  "Five points to Gryffindor for forthrightness, Mr. Longbottom," he called over the hum of conversation, and then he disappeared into the throng of milling customers.

     "Wouldn't want to be Malfoy," Neville said gleefully, buoyed by the award of points.

     _There's an understatement,_ she thought wryly.  _Old McGonagall is probably beside herself.  Malfoy will be lucky to see the sun again in his lifetime.  Might even be expelled.  After all, he didn't just attack a student; no, he attacked a _crippled _student, and that is ever so much worse.  Never mind that it was hardly fatal, and rumor has it that Fred and George have gotten away with worse._

     And you know damn well that the sins of a Gryffindor are easily pardoned, while the sins of Slytherin will never be forgotten.  

_     She couldn't get Professor Snape through me, so she'll settle for Malfoy instead.  How chivalrous._

_     Chivalry and Gryffindor are hardly comfortable bedfellows, as well you should know by now._

     She snorted and heaved her nerveless hand onto the table, where it lay like a shucked mollusk.  The swelling was, as Flitwick had predicted, receding; the flesh of her wrist was now merely pink instead of mottled blue-black, and her fingers were slowly regaining their spindly appearance.  She tried to flex her fingers and was rewarded with a faint, uncoordinated twitch from her thumb.

     "Does it hurt?" Neville asked, and peered and her hand with avid curiosity.

She shook her head.  "No.  Just feels like a shot of Novacaine."

     "Nova-what?"

     "Never mind.  It's a Muggle anesthetic dentists use," she muttered absently.  She was not in the mood for idle conversation.

     She studied the tavern and the people in it.  The sparse little pub was filled to capacity and beyond with chattering students and watchful teachers and Aurors.  Every chair at every table was claimed, and the cheery clink of butterbeer bottles and the grinding scrape of chairs being pushed from tables punctuated the reverberating babel of conversation from all corners.  Everywhere she looked, robes bearing the Hogwarts crest flitted to and fro in a merry cavalcade.  Feet stumped heartily across the freshly scoured floor, and behind the bar, a harried but pleasant barmaid handed out a steady stream of mugs containing steaming apple cider.

     Even without the barriers of damp Common Room walls, the segregation of the Houses still held true.  Like with like.  The Gryffindors huddled together in the corner nearest the fire, while the Hufflepuffs hunkered in the opposite corner, setting to the tasks of drinking and conversation with the gritty, yeomen resignation of their House.  The Ravenclaws occupied the center tables, murmuring in hushed, eager tones and thumbing idly through books propped against satchels and brimming mugs of cider.  And then there were the Slytherins.

     They sat in the corner furthest from the door, bundled in their robes against the warmth and light, hunched around their tables like stooped crones over cold, empty cauldrons.  They clutched their mugs in blue-nailed hands, and their discourse, what little there was of it, was terse and subdued.  The more intrepid of them played a desultory game of Gobstones, and the clack of the colored stones as they rolled over the uneven wood of the table echoed in the uncomfortable silence that separated them from their boisterous fellows like an unseen partition.  

     The reason for their taciturn, wary silence was readily apparent.  Aurors, some in various shoddy guises and others wearing bright blue robes, surrounded them, stalking wolves pursuing helpless, hopelessly ensnared prey.  They sat in chairs and threaded through the crowd, eyes alert and diligent ears straining for the slightest hint of pernicious subterfuge.  There was a pattern to their movement, a slowly, inexorably tightening circle that closed around the Slytherin students, the clandestine knotting of the inevitable noose, and each time they passed the tables with their confident, disdainful stride, dozens of pairs of furious eyes followed their circuit.

     _They're closing ranks as best they can, pulling up the drawbridges and manning the ramparts.  Settling in for the siege._

A cold smile flitted across her face.  Well did she recognize that behavior.  It was a strategy often employed by the denizens of D.A.I.M.S. to ward off the unwelcome proddings of the white-coated, bespectacled psychiatrists and psychologists who tried now and again to unlock the carefully guarded secrets of their minds.  They had closed their mouths, squared their shoulders, and bent their heads against the assault, rebuffed it with stony silence and hard, unreadable expressions, confounded it with cryptic non sequiturs, and in the end, the interlopers had retreated in exhausted defeat, none the wiser for their clumsy, juvenile fumblings.  

     It was strange to see her own tactics employed by those she would have considered her enemies a country and a lifetime ago, and more than a little unsettling.  She saw them as the pointy-headed pop psychologists had no doubt seen her, saw them as obdurate and remote and incontrovertibly alien, existing in a place and on a plane unattainable by anyone else.  It was as though she were observing them from behind a pane of porous glass; she could look, smell, and taste, but she could not touch, not quite.

     _Mirror, mirror on the wall,_ she thought, and her hand reached out and picked up the piece of parchment Flitwick had given her.  She turned it over and over in her hands with dreamy, absent fingers.

     She started when Neville suddenly nudged her in the shoulder.  "Hm?" she said, and her fingers spasmed around the crisp parchment.

     "Sorry, didn't mean to frighten you," he murmured hastily.  "I just wondered if you'd fancy a bit of cider?"

     "Sure.  It is chilly in here."  She tugged at the scarf around her neck and tucked it beneath her chin.  

     "Anything else?"

     She turned her head and scanned the bar.  "Do you think they might have stew or something?  I'm starving."  As if to confirm her assertion, her stomach gave a low, burbling rumble.

     He shrugged.  "I don't know.  I can ask.  If not, we can look somewhere else."

     "All right.  My Galleon purse is inside the pocket just above my left hip."  She shifted and tilted her hip upward to grant him access.

     He flapped a hand at her in good-natured dismissal.  "I've got it."

     "Nonsense," she persisted.  "I'll get this round.  You can get the next."

     "Have it your way," he replied amiably, and plunged his hand into the proffered pocket of her robes.

     Even through the thick wool of her winter robes, Neville's hand was warm against her skin, the baking heat of a glowing coal clothed in flesh, and she closed her eyes to savor the sensation, grateful that Draco was not here to spoil it with choice invective, make it seem dirty and lurid.  There was nothing erotic about it.  It was a simple touch, unnoticed by the giver, and yet she treasured it just as much as Malfoy's crushing grip that had sent cold fire surging between her legs.

     "Got it," Neville said, and pulled a small, maroon felt sack from her pocket with a triumphant flourish.

     She sighed in disappointment at the loss of contact and readjusted herself in her chair.  "Take what you need.  There's plenty left."

     "Right."  He loosened the purse strings and withdrew a handful of coins.  When he was done, he drew the strings closed again and handed her the purse.

     "Thanks."  She laboriously shoved it into the pocket from whence it had come.

     He turned and ambled toward the bar, and when she could no longer see him, she returned her gaze to the milieu of people in front of her.  Her hand returned to the parchment from Flitwick and began to fold and unfold one corner into a tiny point.  

     More students had lined up to report to Flitwick, and their stamping, constantly shifting bodies formed a bottleneck in the narrow doorway.  Chairs scraped and groaned as their occupants dragged them closer to the tables in order to make room for the encroaching throng.  Aurors, disturbed in their heavy-handed surveillance of the students and the Slytherins in particular, scowled and folded their papers beneath their arms as they reluctantly surrendered their seats to shivering newcomers and took places along the walls.

     The passage of time and the scarcity of space made the de facto segregation of the Houses impossible, and some began to mingle, rogue satellites breaking from the orbit of the planet to which they normally paid unwavering obeisance.  Hannah Abbott, a Hufflepuff, sidled over to the Ravenclaw tables and struck up a conversation with Cho Chang, and Luna Lovegood, a world unto her own, glided over and ensconced herself in the chair beside a beleaguered Ron Weasley, who greeted her arrival with no discernible interest.

     Rebecca watched them for a moment before letting her eyes drift to where Hermione Granger sat, her nose buried in a thick book and one hand snarled in the unruly nest of her hair.  Her face was a pale, bruised model of unblinking concentration, and even from this distant vantage point, Rebecca could see the grim shadow of stress that clung to the hollows of her cheeks and the flesh beneath her eyes.  She looked positively spent, and yet she continued to turn pages and scribble notes with a shaking hand.

     _She doesn't quit, I'll give her that.  Pugnacious and relentless as a locust._

     She wondered if the erstwhile Granger had found anything of significance in the interminable hours of her research.  If she had, it had been of no help to Potter-he was still lying in the Hospital Wing, a lump of living clay molded into human form.  

     _You'll have to talk to her sooner or later.  She may be a tight-assed little prig with an inflated sense of her own importance, but she's undeniably brilliant, and she knows how to research.  Not to mention she's friends with Potter and more privy than most to his condition._

     She grunted.  Picking Hermione's formidable brain for answers to the mystery surrounding Potter's collapse was not something to which she was looking forward.  Since their squabble over the matter of house elf rights, Hermione, though perfectly civil, had been decidedly cool, an arrangement that had suited both of them well until now.  Their armistice had been one of studious avoidance and limited interaction, and the prospect of getting her to freely divulge what she knew of Harry's condition was slim.  Even when Housemates with whom she was on friendly terms broached the subject, she was grimly tight-lipped.

     _You could always try the direct approach, _suggested her grandfather.

_     Oh, yes, that would raise no suspicions whatever.  Every syllable I utter would be duly transmitted to the listening ears of Those-Who-Seem-Wholly-Incapable-Of-Covert-Behavior courtesy of the Listening Charms planted all over the Common Room, and even if they weren't, Granger isn't stupid.  She knows damn well I've never visited Potter, never so much as asked about him before now.  How shall I explain my sudden interest in the affair-I found my misplaced concern for his welfare beneath the Common Room couch?_  _How could she possibly question _that?

     Then pay Potter a visit.  Bring him a bouquet of gardenias or poppies and sit in your chair at his bedside and gnash your teeth like all the rest of them.  Tell him and anyone else who cares enough to ask that you haven't come to see him before now because hospitals hold painful memories for you.  That would hardly be a lie.  Blubber a bit if you can manage it.  Do it every day until the walls come down.

     Bit underhanded, don't you think?  Seems the sort of disingenuous ploy people in the fabled black hats would use.  Doing something like that would make me little better than the Aurors.

Inside her head, her grandfather gave a garrulous, sardonic snort.  _I never figured you for the type that would fall prey to the goody-goody notion that the world was black and white.  It isn't, it never was, and you know it, so stop acting like the goggle-eyed virgin who's gotten her first glimpse of her Romeo's blessed pecker.  You knew going in that it was going to be a nasty, dirty business, and it's a bit late to back out now.  You're in it to the knees, and when you wade through bullshit, you can hardly expect to come out of it smelling like Chanel._

     She grimaced, torn between horror and juvenile amusement.  Though she was accustomed to his acerbic tongue, it had been a long time since he had been so unequivocally frank.

     _Could you be any more blunt, grandpa?_

     The request had been tongue-in-cheek, but her grandsire was only too happy to oblige.

     _What I'm trying to tell you, girl, and what you know deep down, what've you always known, is that it's every man for himself now.  No black, no white, just by any means necessary, and if you have to exploit people to get what you need, manipulate their trust and their emotions to get where you need to be, then you'd better have no compunction at all about doing just that.  You polish up those steel knives and you drive them as deeply as they go if it comes to it.  It's as simple as that, and it's the only chance your professor has._

     _Even if, by some catastrophic lapse in judgment, Hermione decides to take me into her confidence, what then?  What do I tell her when she asks about my change of heart?_

_     Whatever you have to.  The only bad lie from now on is the one that doesn't work.  Tell her a convenient truth.  Tell her you want to help because you know what it's like to watch a friend suffer, watch them wither before your very eyes, while all you can do is cry and puke and send useless prayers to a God gone stone deaf and blind and half-mad from all the inhumanity He Himself has inflicted upon His "children".  Tell her you don't want her to go through the same thing.  It's more truth than lie, and what she doesn't know won't hurt her._

     Had she not been sitting, she would have fallen to the floor.  The idea was so ludicrous and so _profane_ that she felt sick.  She closed her eyes and swallowed a knot of greasy bile, and her hand closed around the scrip of parchment with which she had been toying hard enough to leave behind tiny, crescent tears in the wake of her fingernails.  Her skin, heretofore a pliant sheath of ice, was suddenly too warm, and she wrenched the Gryffindor scarf from her neck with a strangled wheeze.

     She wouldn't.  She couldn't.  Some things were sacred, never meant to be exploited, even for the best of reasons, and _that_ was one of them.  Those eternal eleven months spent at the bedside of her dying friend, watching as the crisply starched white linens and the mockingly sterile bedframe devoured him from the inside out and left behind nothing but an unrecognizable husk were hers, her private grievance against God and the world, and nobody but Him was going to see it.  It was a votive candle for someone long dead, and to use it to pry potentially useless information from the lips of the school swot was a desecration of his memory.

_     I would do anything for love, but I won't do that,_ she thought suddenly, and clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a bray of lunatic laughter.  A second-year Gryffindor at an adjoining table shot her a wary, appraising glance and shifted his chair away from her.  _I can't do that, Grandpa.  _

     _You need to decide which is stronger-your loyalty to the dead, or your loyalty to the living.  You can't help Brad anymore.  He went to whatever rest was waiting for him, and he is far beyond the reach of this world and its petty machinations.  Your professor, on the other hand, has no such luxury.  Ethics are a liability you can no longer afford._

     She snorted and scrubbed her palm across her pinched, gaunt face.  _What about all that claptrap about right and wrong you fed me as a little girl?  _Though she was unaware of it, she had begun to stroke her forefinger back and forth over the wispy goosedown hair of her forearm.

     _As of Tuesday morning, that line has been blown to Hell._

     She laughed, a hollow, mirthless death rattle in her throat.  So that's how it was, then?  She searched for a kernel of surprise within her soul, some shred of healthy outrage, but she could find none, only a bitter amusement that the truth she had long known had at last proclaimed itself for all to see.  No more coy insinuations or demure semantics, just the unadorned, ugly realization that right and wrong existed only as long as people said they did, and when they grew cumbersome, it was no great trial to cast them carelessly aside, the discarded playthings of a naïve child.

     She looked at Hermione, hunched and squinting with feverish desperation over the likely minute text of some obscure and crumbling tome with her bedraggled and drooping quill clutched in one hand like a weapon against the skulking beast of failure, and tried to prepare herself for what she was about to do.  She swallowed against another wave of horrified shame.  A vision arose in her mind's eye of the pudgy Auror as he searched the Common Room sofa.  _Wasn't so lordly when we finished with him, _he crowed inside her head, and she whimpered softly.

     _Father God and Sonny Jesus, I'm better than him, aren't I?  I have to be.  _She chanced another peek at Hermione, who was gnawing absently on a ragged fingernail, seemingly oblivious to the thin ruby rivulet of blood dripping down her wrist with hypnotic, exquisite slowness.  _I don't want to do this, not even for Professor Snape.  There has to be some other way.  You can throw all the philosophy in the world at me, but this is still fundamentally, undeniably _wrong_.  It's grave robbing._

_     Put your Gryffindor sensibilities aside and get going,_ her grandfather ordered abruptly, but beneath the no-nonsense facade of his command, there was a wrenching tenderness, as though he understood just what he was asking of her.

     She swiped the back of her hand across dry, chapped lips and winced when the tortured skin there broke with a prickle of moist heat.  _I have Gryffindor tendencies.  Won't McGonagall be thrilled?  _

She tucked the scrap of parchment from Flitwick into the pocket of her robes and reached for her joystick with stiff, icy fingers, but before she had even pulled away from the table, Colin Creevey appeared.

     "Mind if I sit?" he asked, and pointed at an empty chair.  His ancient, unwieldy camera was tucked awkwardly beneath his arm, and he held a steaming mug in one hand.

     She blinked at him, unable to conceal her surprise.  To her recollection, she and Creevey, who she regarded as a histrionic nuisance, hadn't exchanged so much as a syllable since her arrival at Hogwarts.  He spent most of his time wandering the corridors with his camera at the ready, snapping random, candid photographs of the school's denizens, or, lately, standing morose vigil over the bedside of Harry Potter like a bereft steward holding a deathwatch for his ailing lord.  For her part, she had passed her free hours under the baleful gaze of Professor Snape, and what little social time she had had not been spent in proximity to him or his simpering brother, Dennis.

     Whatever reason he's got, you let him sit.  Don't let this opportunity pass unseized.  If nothing else, you can put off the unpleasant business of using your dearly departed friend as the key to pick Hermione Granger's emotional lock.

     _What opportunity? _she thought, and then it came to her.

     Colin had been there that fateful day, had, in fact, been the one to catch the glittering phial of Potter's Advanced Sleeping Draught before it could shatter upon the stone floor and dash all of Professor Snape's malevolent hopes into a thousand prismatic shards of comeuppance denied.  Maybe he had seen something, felt something, smelled something that Professor Snape, in his fury at being interrupted in his moment of triumph and impatience to be rid of the unwanted interloper, had missed.  Even if he hadn't, he and his brother often accompanied Hermione and Ron on their daily pilgrimages to visit Potter in the infirmary, and someone as inveterately curious and nosy as he was would certainly pick up bits and pieces that Potter's friends, insulated in their cloying grief, would not.

     For the first time since the Aurors had burst into the Potions classroom and levied their terrible accusation against Professor Snape, her analytical mind surfaced from beneath the tumultuous morass of exhaustion and overwrought emotion, and she smiled.

     "Erm, sure," she said, and took her hand off the control stick of her chair.

     "Thanks."  He slid into one of the empty chairs and set his camera carefully in the other.  Then he took a hearty sip of his cider and placed the stein on the table in front of him, his hands wrapped around its base as though it were a lifeline.

     Which, she thought as she got her first good look at him, was not outside the realm of possibility.  He looked, were it possible, worse than Hermione.  Always a slight boy, he was now nearly skeletal.  The painful jut of his collarbone was evident beneath the heavy fabric of his robes, and the pasty flesh of his face was pulled taut over the sharp, angular bones of his face.  When he took another fortifying sip of cider, she saw that his nails were well on their way to joining Hermione's in ragged, raw neglect.

     _And Pomfrey thought _I _would spread contagion, _she thought with a surge of black amusement.  _Looks like Sleeping Potter has beaten me to it._

     Colin trailed his uneven nails along the tarnished, dented sides of his stein in dreamy contemplative strokes.  "Your lip is bleeding," he said conversationally.

     She frowned and touched her fingers to her lips.  "Am I?"  Her fingers came away smeared with blood.

     "Malfoy do that?"

     She shook her head.  "I don't think so.  He twisted my wrist, though."  She held up the appendage in question and wiggled her fingers experimentally.  "Professor Flitwick seems to have fixed it."

     "McGonagall was pretty angry when she dragged him out of here.  Don't think even his father's connections will get him out of this one."

     _Don't bet on it,_ she mused, but her only answer was a noncommittal grunt, and an awkward silence descended.  She drummed her fingers upon the tabletop and eyed him with bland curiosity.  His eyes, which had always reminded her of a dimly alarmed lemur, were sunken, dull pits inside his face as he stared back at her in silence.

     "Not that I mind, Colin," she ventured at length, "but what are you doing here?"

     He didn't respond right away.  Instead, he pinched the bony bridge of his nose between his fingers and scrubbed at his hollow, haunted eyes with the palm of one hand.  Then he said candidly, "You look terrible."

     A startled huff of amusement escaped her.  "Yes, well, there seems to be a bit of that going around," she observed drily, and let her gaze drift to the sea of haggard faces all around them.

     "It's the Aurors," he said with sudden vehemence.  "They're everywhere, skittering about like spiders.  Can't even go to the loo without them hearing about it."

     She decided not to point out that she was quite accustomed to this state of affairs.  "I know what you mean.  They scattered everything onto the floor when they searched my trunk, and Parvati has been complaining for days that they broke her crystal ball."

     He snorted.  "Wouldn't be surprised.  I was sure they'd break my camera."  His hand strayed to the squat black box crouching in the chair beside him like a loyal hound, and he stroked the casing fondly, almost reverently.

     The camera.  Her gaze was drawn to it, to the milky flashbulb that peered blindly at her, the cataracted eye of a dead Cyclops.  An inexplicable shiver of dread darted down her spine, light and quick as the legs of a butterfly, and she shivered.  She wanted to stop looking at it, to turn her head away, but she couldn't.  The vertebrae of her neck seemed to have fused into an unyielding mass beneath her skin, and any attempt to shift her gaze produced only the muted cellophane crackle of muscles and the pained creak of tendons.

     Why an innocuous piece of equipment she had passed over a thousand times before should affect her so profoundly, she could not say.  Colin and his ubiquitous camera were part and parcel of the Hogwarts landscape and the Gryffindor Common room, as expected and familiar a sight as the shadowy hulk of the giant squid as it drifted through the flat, mirrored waters of the school lake.  There was hardly a soul who hadn't been immortalized by the impartial lens.  To be captured on film was now considered part of the Hogwarts experience.  So why was she staring at it with unaccountable unease?

     _You're tired.  You've been thinking and worrying too much, and you're seeing bogeys in every shadow and bush.  Get a grip.  Get some food in your belly, and things will make sense again.  A good night's sleep wouldn't hurt, either._

  All of it was sound advice and undoubtedly true, so why didn't she believe a word of it?  Her lip curled in an unconscious snarl, and her tongue darted out to moisten it. 

     _Be reasonable, girl, _came her grandfather's voice.  _It's not the camera that bothers you.  It reminds you of something, that's all.  Something important._

     Her heart, which had begun to triphammer against her ribs with jarring force, slowed, and she let out a relieved sigh.  He was right, of course.  It did stir a faint and crumbling memory within her, but it was dim and far away, and when she reached for it, it sifted through her fingers like dust.  She willed it to return, to coalesce into a tangible thought she could scrutinize with painstaking care, but the only thing to take shape inside her head was the first heated spike of an oncoming headache, so she let the matter drop and absently kneaded her temple.  

     "All right, Rebecca?" Colin asked quietly.

     She jumped, a guilty giggle on her lips.  She had been so busy chasing memories and ogling the camera that she had quite forgotten its owner.  She ran a hand through her hair and tore her gaze from the lidless eye of the flashbulb.  "I'm fine; just the beginnings of a headache."

     "Little wonder, that.  With all this cloak and dagger business, it's a wonder the infirmary hasn't run out of Anti-Ache Powder.  I daresay they will before too long, what, with all Madam Pomfrey's energy going into brewing antidotes for Harry."

     That piqued her interest.  "An antidote?  Have they discovered what poisoned him, then?"  She leaned forward and propped her elbows on the table.

     He shrugged, a brusque, brutal jerk of his scrawny shoulders, and took another gulp of cider.  He grimaced.  "Cold," he muttered.  Then, "If they have, it hasn't worked.  He's still cold as a marble slab."

     "Any ideas?  Surely they must talk."  _Easy, Rebecca.  Tread lightly.  Not so eager._  She forced her hands to remain flat on the table, determined not to betray unseemly interest in his answer.

     "Not with the Aurors standing about, they don't," he said sourly, and shot a baleful glance at a Ministry official loitering in an adjacent corner.  "You've no idea what it's like trying to talk to a mate with that lot standing about.  Imagine they'd like to strip-search us if they could.  Feel like a ruddy criminal every time I go in there."

     "Actually, I do," she said.

     A memory surfaced in her mind of one of her final visits to Brad in the D.A.I.M.S. infirmary.  He had been in the last losing stages of his battle by then, and he had drifted in and out of consciousness, cocooned in a nest of clear plastic tubing, I.V.s that only served to prolong the agony, extend the deathwatch by precious, excruciating minutes, hours, and days.  The only sounds in the room had been the hushed beep of the cardiac monitor, the mechanical clack of the machines as they delivered a carefully measured dose of borrowed time into his emaciated arm, thigh, or calf, and the sussurating shuffle of crepe-soled shoes on spotless linoleum.

     The shoes had been the worst, because she had known that they were attached to the feet of stern-faced nurses, nurses who hovered like voiceless wraiths around the periphery of his struggle, waiting for the moment when they would pull the starched linen sheet over his wasted face and watch the bed devour him whole.  And while they waited for the appointed hour and the completion of their duty, they watched and listened to the final goodbyes and useless lamentations of those who could no longer avoid the knowledge that they would soon be left behind forever.  

     It had been impossible, sitting beneath the prying, knowing gazes of the nurses, to say the things she had so desperately needed to say before time stopped, and at ten-not-quite-eleven, she had not yet acquired the means to express, in any coherent fashion, the thoughts of her head and furious, bewildered heart.  So she had done what she could, prattled inanely about things that had long since ceased to matter, and held on to his cold, limp hand so tightly that her own fingers throbbed.  Hello and goodbye and please don't go, all encoded in the language of books and parchments and dining hall gossip.  

     So, yes, she did know how Creevey felt, better than she ever wanted to.  If Creevey, who was little more than an infatuated hanger-on of the Holy Hogwarts Triumvirate, felt out of place and unwelcome, how must Potter's loyal sycophants, Hermione and Ron, feel?  Surely the things they had to say to their fallen hero were just as sacrosanct to them as the last garbled confidences to Brad had been to her, and she wondered if they would grow to despise the Aurors as deeply as she had come to despise the granite-faced nurse who had been waiting for her in the D.A.I.M.S. infirmary the day she had discovered her friend was no more.

     More to the point, what was it going to be like for _her_, the Gryffindor by fiat who had never shared in the dewy-eyed adulation three-quarters of the school heaped upon him?  No doubt those assigned to guard him would paying special attention to anything she had to say, if for no other reason than she was a new face among the obsequious masses.  Surely they would notice if she simply sat there, silent as a fencepost, and stared at his unmoving face, and they would not take kindly to her removing his bedclothes in search of physical clues to what had befallen him.

     Actually, the stuporous, vapid silence might work in your favor, add to the already-prevalent notion that you're addled.  The gormier, the better.

     She shifted in her seat and cast a glance at the bar to see what was keeping Neville.  The top of his head was just visible amid the crowd of students jockeying to catch the eye of Madam Rosmerta, and from the looks of it, he would not be returning to the table in the near future.  She heaved a private sigh of shamed relief.  He, bless his noble, Gryffindor heart, would only get in the way.

     _Funny thing, that.  People said the same thing about you not long ago, and as I recall, you hated it._

     She scowled and thrust the thought away.  If honor and dignity and every ethical code she had ever been taught were about to be thrown by the wayside and trampled into distant memory, then she was damn well going to do a thorough job of it.  She leaned across the table, and her blonde hair fell around her face in a shielding, conspiratorial golden curtain.

     "Colin," she said hesitantly, "do you think it would be all right if I visited Harry?"  

     He stared at her in honest surprise for a moment, then smiled in mild befuddlement.  "I can't see why he would mind.  He's a good bloke."  He swirled his cold cider around in slow circles, tilting the mug first one way, then the other.

     "It's just, well, I'm not sure if I should.  I'm not exactly a close friend."

     "Most people aren't.  The only people who can lay claim to that coveted title are Ron and Hermione."  At the mention of their names, he let his eyes drift to where the pair now sat, Ron drooping miserably in his chair as Luna Lovegood murmured incessantly about Crumple-Horned Snorkacks in her dreamy lilt, and Hermione still crouching over her beloved books.  "But we go anyway.  Harry needs all the support we can muster, you know?"

     She nodded.  "I don't suppose I should stay long."

     "You wouldn't want to," he said flatly.  "It's distressing, seeing him lying there like that.  Anyway, they wouldn't let you stay much longer than that.  Pomfrey is beside herself trying to organize the basic potion stores to last as long as possible.  Without Snape, they'll have to depend on the Mediwizards at St. Mungo's to replace them, and according to rumor, they're hardly the most efficient lot."

     "Really?" she muttered vaguely, not really interested, but doing her best to keep him talking.  She folded her hands in front of her.

     "Mmhmm," he grunted.  "Who knew that greasy git Snape was actually useful?"

     She stifled the urge to wrangle her stiff, unwieldy fingers into a crude gesture of displeasure and decided to seize the opportunity his vitriol had presented.  "About Professor Snape," she said softly, slurring her words lest Aurors be listening.

     He frowned at her sudden change in elocution.  "What of him?" he asked dubiously.

     "Well, I was wondering…"  She trailed off and scratched the bridge of her nose.  "When you caught the phial that day, did you…feel anything funny about it?"  Her eyes darted around the room to see if any of the Aurors had registered any undue interest in their conversation, but all Ministerial eyes were currently trained on the Slytherin section of the pub, where Goyle, bereft without his pampered patron, was cogitating laboriously over the sprawl of Gobstones on the floor in front of him.

     Colin blinked at her.  "Funny?" he repeated, mystified.  

     She shrugged.  "Yes, funny.  Anything wet or sticky or that smelled funny?"  Her hands twined restlessly on the table, as though aware of the inadequacy of her explanation and desperate to fix it.

     Easy.  Never let them see you nervous.  No emotion, no fear.

_     And how, pray tell, am I to manage that?_

_     Disconnect from everything except the one thing you want more than anything in the world and tell yourself you will stop at nothing to see it happen._

     Though her eyes were locked on Colin's haggard, sleep-deprived face, they were no longer seeing him.  They were turned inward, turned to the poisonous and intoxicating memory of wishing the pudgy Auror had been writhing at her feet as she held him in the agonizing sway of a terrible Curse.  She saw it with vivid, bald clarity, and so strong was the grip of her imagination that she felt the furtive, phantom surge of Dark and vengeful magic in her veins, the irritating, skittering tingle of it underneath her cold nail beds.  Her mouth was filled with the bitter taste of gall and retribution, and the delicate hairs of her nape quivered in delicious anticipation.

     She still wanted to see her vision come to fruition, but now she wanted more.  She wanted to see Professor Snape restored to his offices and garbed in his spartan black robes, robes that smelled of allspice and parchment dust and spoke of doom from on High.  It was no longer her frail, palsied hand that held the judging wand, but his, long and graceful and unwavering as carved ivory as he gave form to his bitterness in a crackling, merciless stream of red.  His face was impassive as he watched the man writhe at his feet like a crippled insect, and so was hers, but in her eyes was a triumphant, curdled glee.

     _One potato, two potato, three potato, four.  See the Auror a-writhing on the floor, _came the rhyme, and though her face was scrupulously blank, her soul smiled, and her hands stilled.

     Something must have shown on her face because Colin sat back in his chair and eyed her with wary curiosity.  "No…I don't think so.  Why?"

     "No reason, really," she answered absently.  "I just thought that if you had, it might have helped the Aurors in their investigation."  

     Colin pursed his lips and considered this.  "Do you know, I'd never thought of that," he conceded.  "If I had known what would happen, I would have paid a spot more mind."  He frowned and rubbed his bleary eyes.  "Anyway, it's no use.  If anyone is going to find out what happened to Harry, it'll be Ron and Hermione, Hero Twins."  He smirked into his mug.

     Though she said nothing, the bitterness in his voice surprised her.  He was normally an upbeat, cheerful presence on the grounds, chattering to his brother, Dennis, while he kept an eye out for the object of his all-consuming adoration, and whenever he found him, his excited, fluting voice drifted through the air like the joyous peal of church bells.  Despite their ill-disguised annoyance at his bug-eyed idolatry of Potter, most students regarded him as the epitome of unbridled optimism.

     A heavy silence descended over the table, marred only by the dusty shuffle of owl feathers from the cage at her feet.  Colin opened his mouth to say something, then shut it again, and when he did not speak for several minutes, she dropped her gaze to the pocked tabletop and lost herself in the catacombs of carved initials and pithy vulgarities.

     _Tiberius Crumble is a wanking tosser,_ she read, and smiled wearily.

     _Well, Tiberius Crumble of wanking fame,_ she thought, _what have we learned here today?_

Remarkably little, that was what.  If Colin had told her that yes, he had felt something strange on the phial that day, then she would have had a starting point, but since he hadn't, she was still stuck at square one and no closer to clearing Professor Snape's name.  It occurred to her that Colin simply hadn't noticed anything because he had been too busy trying to escape a furious Professor Snape with all his limbs still attached, but in all likelihood, he was right.  There had been nothing on the outside of the phial.  If there had been, Professor Snape would have noticed.  The man was precise, if nothing else.

     _Great going, Nancy Drew._  She was seized with the need to lay her head upon the rough surface of the table and shut the world out.

     "May I take your picture?" Colin asked suddenly, and he straightened in his chair, a dull glimmer of enthusiasm in the dark pits of his eyes.

     "I can't imagine why you want one," she muttered, and cast a sidelong glance at the camera perched smugly in the chair beside him.  She was rewarded with another thrill of clammy unease, this one in the pit of her stomach.  She was suddenly sure she did not want her picture taken.

     "I've gotten pictures of everyone else," he said.  "I'd like to keep my collection complete."  He was looking at her with the scrutinizing gaze of a photographer, sizing her up.

     "I'm hardly photogenic at the moment," she protested in an attempt to forestall his burgeoning fervor.

     "Neither is anyone else," he pointed out imperturbably.  "If you like, I'll make you a copy, and you can send it to your friends across the pond."

     "I don't know," she hedged.

     "Please?  It'll be fun; I haven't taken any pictures since the Killjoy Squadron showed up."  He nodded curtly in the direction of an Auror who was thumbing restlessly through a battered copy of the _Daily Prophet_ and sipping a Firewhiskey.

     She started to refuse again, but he was smiling, a broad, effusive smile the likes of which had not been seen since the advent of the blue-robed inquisition that now stalked the school corridors, and so, against her better judgment and the leaden unease that held her in its iron grip, she relented and allowed him to maneuver her into position in front of one of the grimy windows behind their table.

     "Smile," he instructed her as he raised the camera, but she was painfully aware of both the glaring white iris of the leering flashbulb and the smothering weight of curious stares against her bony shoulders, and the best she could manage was a frozen rictus of exposed gum.

     _Stole my soul_, she thought as the flashbulb exploded with white light and dazzled her vision with electric purple sunspots.  _The hoodoo man stole my soul._  It was a ridiculous thought, and she giggled as she blinked to clear the dancing blots from her vision.

     "Wish you'd smiled like that when I snapped the picture," he said wryly, but he clapped her on the shoulder all the same as he reclaimed his seat at the table.  "Thanks."

     "You're welcome."

     He stared down at the camera in his lap, its milky, blind eye staring sightlessly back.  "Harry never liked it when I took his picture," he whispered, almost too low to be heard.

     "He didn't?" she said blankly, not sure how or why they had returned to the subject of Potter. 

     He shook his head.  "No.  He always used to try and dodge me if he saw me coming.  Never had time for it, he said.  He was too busy looking out for He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.  So busy that he never spared a look over the other shoulder, apparently.  Well, now he's got all the time in the world, doesn't he?" he said morosely, and set the camera on the chair beside him.

     _One potato, two potato, three potato, four.  See the Auror a-writhing on the floor,_ she chanted inside her head.  It was all she could think to do to conceal her shock at his words.  _What do you know?  _

     "Col-," she began, with the intent to ask him just that, but before she could get any further, Neville returned, carrying two brimming bowls of stew and two mugs of cider.

     "Sorry I took so long," he said breathlessly as he squeezed between two tables to reach them.  "Bit of a queue."  He stopped when he saw Colin.  "Oh, hello, Colin!  Was I interrupting something?"  He looked from her to Colin, who was slouched quietly in his seat, his eyes gazing dully at Ron and Hermione.

     "Not at all," she said, and shook her head.  Whatever she might have learned had slipped away the moment Neville had spoken.

     Neville smiled and slipped into the seat beside her.  He pushed a steaming bowl of stew in front of her, along with a mug of cider.  "Tuck in," he said brightly, grabbing his own bowl and spoon.  " I hope you like it, as it's all they've got."

     The unspoken and unanswered question lingered in her mind for a while, but soon it was banished by the rich, meaty smell of beef stew, and because she was fifteen and mentally exhausted, she temporarily gave up the chase and allowed herself to be swept up in talk about the Quidditch match next weekend and the latest inter-House romances.

     Behind her, the Gobstones rolled over the floor like tiny, round bones.


	40. Reunion

Chapter Forty

     Rebecca had intended to take her new owl to the owlery and have a much-needed soak before going to pick and brood over her untouched food in the Great Hall, but when she arrived in the Entrance Hall, Headmaster Dumbledore was waiting sedately beside a clanking, humming set of armor.

     "Ah, Miss Stanhope, might I have a word?" he asked quietly, and though he was smiling, his eyes were piercing and grave.

     Her stomach, sloshing with the three bowls of savory stew she had eaten at the Three Broomsticks, cramped and dropped into her knees with a painful lurch.  No doubt word of what had happened between her and the inimitable Mr. Malfoy had reached his ears, either from McGonagall, who would have trumpeted her probable maiming to anyone within shouting distance, or from Malfoy.  She tightened her grip around the covered iron cage on her lap and rolled forward.  

     "Yes, sir," she said.

     Neville, who had returned with her, hesitated beside her, his eyes surveying the Headmaster in cautious, curious inquiry.  He shifted from one foot to the other, his mittened hands stuffed into the pocket of his robes.  "Should I come, too, Headmaster?" he asked in weary resignation.  "I saw the whole thing, and so did Seamus."

     The Headmaster's thick, white eyebrows furrowed, an expression of polite confusion on his face.  "Saw what, Mr. Longbottom?"  His hand came up to tug on his long, tapered beard in thoughtful, drifting strokes.

     Neville blanched, a mortified flush suffusing his round cheeks, a scolded cherub, and he dropped his bug-eyed gaze to the safer, less intimidating vista of the stone floor beneath his feet.  "'Bout the skirmish with that prat, Malfoy," he muttered unintelligibly at the toes of his shoes.

     "I'm sorry, Mr. Longbottom, I'm afraid I didn't hear you," the Headmaster replied, and stepped closer to the highly discomfited Neville.

     Poor Neville, keenly aware of the milling students who were watching the exchange with greedy interest, quailed and tucked his neck into his shoulders, a hapless turtle trying desperately to retreat from the snapping, slavering jaws of a wolf.  He shot her a petrified, sidelong glance as he continued to stare at the floor with feverish concentration.

     "-confrontation with Malfoy," he muttered, as indecipherably as ever.

     The Headmaster straightened, and the twinkle in his eye, absent when she had first arrived, blazed with renewed vigor.  "Confrontation with young Mr. Malfoy, did you say?" he said, amused.  Then, more to himself than to her or Neville, who was gazing at him in nearly pathetic gratitude at not having been reprimanded, "That certainly explains quite a bit."  After a moment, his gaze sharpened and returned to Neville.  "No, that won't be necessary.  I believe Professor McGonagall has already sorted out that regrettable situation, much to Mr. Malfoy's chagrin.  Off you go.  Miss Stanhope might be a while."

     "Yes, sir."  Neville turned to her and smiled.  "I'll see you, then."

     She waved.  "All right.  If I get back soon, would you like to play some Exploding Snap?"

     Neville brightened.  "All right."

     With that, he turned and melded into the steady stream of pupils drifting toward the Great Hall.  She wished for a moment that she was with him, jostled by knees and shoulders and wrapped in the warm simmer of body heat, but there was no shirking the Headmaster.  She turned her longing gaze from the place where he had been and fixed them on the Headmaster's face.

     _He knows what I'm thinking_, she thought with no surprise whatsoever, and mustered a wan smile.

     The suit of armor behind the Headmaster hummed more loudly, and she eyed it with wary curiosity.  The visor flopped closed with a shrill creak, and the metal hand holding the tarnished halberd tightened around the shaft.

     The Headmaster followed her gaze, and his smile broadened into a grin.  "Isn't that most remarkable?" he said.  "It's been doing that since breakfast.  I expect one of the younger Aurors tried to Charm it into some sort eavesdropping device," he said drily.

     She snorted.  "Have they always been so incompetent?"  Then, as she realized that might not be the most politic of things to say, she added, "Sir?"

     The Headmaster, however, seemed unruffled by her unsolicited political commentary.  Indeed, he chuckled and rested a warm hand between her scrawny shoulder blades to steer her in the direction of the gargoyle that led to his office.  "Not always, Miss Stanhope.  Professor Moody was once an Auror, if you recall, and Kingsley Shacklebolt has always done his job most admirably.  Sherbet lemon?"  One of the wrapped candies materialized beneath her nose.

     "Thank you, sir," she said, and stopped in order to take the proffered sweet from him.  When it was nestled safely in the folds of robe that sagged between her knees, she resumed her dogged roll forward.

     "Bertie Bott!" the Headmaster said when they reached the squat, stone-fanged gargoyle that for a millennium had guarded the office of the Headmaster of Hogwarts.  It leered suspiciously at Rebecca for a moment, and then, with a grating shift of haunches, it swung outward to reveal the spiraling staircase that wended its way into ichorous, inky darkness.  He stepped inside and beckoned her to follow.

     She did as she was told, and when her back wheels had cleared the threshold, the gargoyle snapped shut again with an ominous, reverberating crash.  She swallowed a knot of inexplicable apprehension that welled in her throat as she locked her brakes, and her hands, though still frozen and blue from the mid-November chill of Scottish winter, prickled with a fine sheen of greasy sweat.  Her nape was taut with hard ridges of gooseflesh, and the stew, which had tasted like ambrosia to her shriveled stomach while she ate it, curdled, and she burped soundlessly in the darkness.  She wrinkled her nose at the acidic aftertaste.

     _What the hell is wrong with me? _she thought, dimly aware that her sweaty fingers were clamped around the bars of her owl's cage in a tremulous, white-knuckled grip.  _I've been on these stairs before.  There is no danger of falling, and I'm here with the Headmaster, serenity incarnate.  So why can't I relax?_

From its cage, the owl gave an indignant hoot and sidled from one side of its perch to the other, as though it sensed her unease and was trying to flee.  She willed her fingers to slacken their iron grip, but they remained rigid and unyielding as the fingers of a corpse, and she fought an ill-advised titter as the stairs beneath her wound gracefully upward, a gray serpent burrowing blindly beneath the earth.

     _Good Christ, I'm having a panic attack on the stairs, right behind the Headmaster.  How fortuitous._   

     He _isn't here, that's what is wrong with you, _said a rational, cruelly sane voice inside her head.  _All other times save one, you've been sandwiched between black wool and tartan and smothered in the earthy, ancient, comforting smell of allspice and parchment dust.  That's what is wrong, what is missing._

  The voice was right, of course.  Strange as it was, she had come to associate Professor Snape and the inexorably spiraling stairs in her mind, an incongruous tandem that her mind understood nevertheless.  She had come to expect that, when she climbed these steps to Headmaster Dumbledore's secluded ivory tower, he would be there, a daunting, scowling pillar of bedrock normality, a pale, bright compass in the pinwheeling darkness.  But he was not here now, and his simple absence had transformed the stone risers and encroaching walls that she sensed rather than saw into an alien and dangerous landscape.

     She peered into the impenetrable shadows, strained her burning, bulging eyes for a glimpse of phoenix red or the luminescent silver-white of beard, and for a tantalizing instant, a swatch of color rose from the murk, but just as quickly as it had come, it disappeared, swallowed by the gloom.  The cage rattled in her grip, and the cold of the bars bit her fingers through the thin linen covering.

     Her eyes abandoned their search for the Headmaster, or anything else, for that matter, but her nose was not so easily daunted.  The red, wind-chapped nostrils flared, the tiny hairs within each gathering to them motes of dust, unseen messengers of things and people that had passed this way before her, pieces of history the eyes could not see.  She knew what they were looking for, just as she knew that they would not find it.  It had been too long since he had graced these steps, and those who had come after him had washed any vestiges of him away, replaced them with traces of their own.  She inhaled more deeply anyway, hoping against hope, but all that she found was the lemongrass and warmed earth scent of the Headmaster, and beneath that, the far less pleasant odors of cold, wet stone and mildewed age.

     The stairs glided to a stop, and the Headmaster stepped forward and opened the door to his office, his steps light and spry despite the chill.  He strode to his desk without checking to see that she was behind him and seated himself behind his desk.  His hand reached automatically for the bowl of candies afforded a place of honor on his desk, and as she entered and closed the heavy door behind her, he slipped one of the obnoxiously yellow candies into his mouth.

     She had expected him to gesture her to the space before his desk, but he did not.  He merely sat in his chair and looked at her over the polished golden rims of his half-moon spectacles.  He was not smiling at her, but neither did he appear angry.  His face was a carefully sculpted blank, and she was somehow sure that he was looking for something only he could see, an esoteric sign from her stiff and bewildered body that it was ready for what he was about to tell her.  She shifted in her chair, her eyes fixed on the long, narrow bridge of his nose and the muted golden gleam from the rims of his spectacles as they caught and reflected the wan firelight from the blaze in the hearth.  The heat had not yet reached her, and her exhaled breath emerged in a gossamer plume.  On his perch beside the door, Fawkes preened and trilled, a single note that hung in the air long after he had closed his beak, and her owl let out an intrigued hoot.

     The Headmaster steepled his fingers over his abdomen and said, "Are you all right, Miss Stanhope?  You look a bit peaked."

     She nodded, though in reality, she was not certain _how_ she was.  "I'm fine, sir.  I was just-,"  She stopped abruptly.  She had been about to say, _I was just used to being sandwiched between Professors Snape and McGonagall,_ but then the juvenile part of her brain, the peculiar ability of every teenager to find the perverse in the innocuous, had realized how that would sound, and she chomped viciously on the inside of her cheek to suppress a bray of horrified laughter.  "I was just very cold.  Being from Florida, I'm more accustomed to perpetual warmth," she amended hastily, and forced herself to sit up straight.

     "Indeed," was his only response, and she knew at once that he had seen through her flimsy lie.  Then, "Would you like some hot tea?  Cocoa, if it's more to your liking?"

     "Yes, sir, I would like that very much," she said, grateful that he had not pressed her for the truth.  Despite the persistent, encompassing warmth that had at last permeated the expansive room, her bones were brittle icicles beneath her skin, and the tortured joints of her hips were filled with bits of ground glass.

     "Dipply," he called, and clapped his hands twice.

     Almost immediately, there was an echoing _crack_, and the stooped, wizened little elf appeared, one leathery hand fisted in the small of her back, as though she were trying to massage away a cramp.  She bowed, her drooping ears scraping the floor, and peered inquisitively at the Headmaster with bulbous, goggling eyes.

     "Is Headmaster Dumbledore calling Dipply?" she asked, her squeaky voice loud in the otherwise quiet room.

     The Headmaster smiled, and with it, some of his more customary vivacity suffused his face.  "Yes, Dipply, I did.  Would you please bring Miss Stanhope and me some tea and hot cocoa?"

     "Is you wanting scones and cakes, Headmaster Dumbledore, sir?"

     The Headmaster lifted his beneficent gaze from the elf and raised an eyebrow in mute query.  When she shook her head, he looked down at the waiting Dipply again.  "No, the tea and cocoa will be sufficient."

     "Yes, Headmaster Dumbledore, sir."  Dipply lifted the ragged hem of her tea towel and dropped into a curtsy.  "Right away, Headmaster Dumbledore, sir."  She disappeared with another miniature thunderclap.

     "I see you've bought an owl," he said in the ensuing silence, and inclined his head in the direction of the cage in her lap.

     "Yes, sir."  She shifted the weight of the cage from her quadriceps with a wince.  "I thought it might prove useful."

     "Oh?"

     She smiled.  _Funny how he can infuse so much into that single, breathy syllable.  _"Yes, sir.  It has occurred to me that I'll need a bit of outside help with the endeavor upon which we have agreed.  Help from across the Atlantic."

     "A trans-Atlantic owl, then?"  There had been no need to elaborate on the "endeavor" to which she had so euphemistically referred, apparently.

     "Yes, sir."

     A smile skirled on the corners of his mouth.  "I should warn you that the post is being watched most vigorously, Miss Stanhope.  All incoming and outgoing post is read and approved by Ministry officials." 

     "I expected so, sir, but I can't see why the Ministry would be interested in a fantasy story that's been passed among the broken and bored from time immemorial."  She smiled and shifted the owl's cage again.

     She thought he would surely pursue this enigmatic line of discourse, but he only rubbed his hands together and said, "No, I should think not, though the more ambitious are apt to think that it is an allegory for governmental subversion."

     She laughed.  "I don't see how, but I'll bear that in mind, sir."

     "It has been my experience, Miss Stanhope, that a skillful government can uncover a conspiracy in a simple request for a bottle of ink."  He smiled, and some of the tension left his face.  He looked more like himself now.  "Now," he said briskly, leaning forward in his chair, "about this confrontation with Mr. Malfoy."

     Her hands tightened their grip on the cage, and her eyes itched with the need to roll toward the heavens in pained exasperation, but she knew better than to show such disrespect to the Headmaster, and she dutifully kept her eyes fixed on his face.  "Yes, sir?"

     "Was it serious?"

     She shrugged.  "I didn't think so, sir.  He took offense to the fact that I put my hand on his shoulder, and we had a skirmish."

     "I see," said the Headmaster, seemingly unsurprised by this information.  "Do you consider the matter closed?"

     She gave a dismissive nod.  "Yes, sir."  _But you can bet your boots McGonagall doesn't, oh, no._

     "How did you find Hogsmeade?" he asked, and popped another sweet into his mouth.

     Tired as she was, she did not miss the question couched within the idle query.  _Did you learn anything of interest?  Have you made any progress?_  She reached behind her neck with one splay-fingered hand and kneaded the stony muscles there, wincing as stiff fingers prodded the knots of tension.  

     "I had a chat with Colin Creevey," she said as she jabbed the point of her finger into the center of a particularly stubborn mass of unyielding sinew.  It released with a gelid pop, and her left arm warmed with improved circulation.

     Before he could respond, Dipply the house elf reappeared with a loud pop, a tray held above her head.  On it, a silver tea set was bookended by a pair of steaming teacups, and a bowl containing sugar cubes teetered precariously on the furthest edge.  

     "Here you is, Headmaster Dumbledore, sir," she announced reverently, and slid the tray onto his desk, careful not to dislodge any of his inkpots or piles of untidy parchment from their places.

     "Thank you, Dipply.  Magnificent, as ever!"  He beamed at her through the clouds of steam rising from the cups in front of him.

     Dipply dropped her gaze and giggled, tugging furiously on the hem of her tea towel.  "You is too nice to Dipply, Headmaster Dumbledore, sir," she squeaked happily.  She looked up at him again, her eyes wide.  "Is Headmaster Dumbledore needing anything else?"

     The Headmaster shook his head.  "No, Dipply, that will be all."

     Dipply dropped into a low curtsy, and her aged knees gave a muffled creak of protest.  "Good evening, Headmaster Dumbledore, sir," she said gravely, and disappeared again with the sharp crack of displaced air.

     The Headmaster picked up his teacup, took an experimental sip, and put it down again.  "A bit of sugar, I think," he murmured, and reached for the tongs; he dropped in three cubes.  He picked up his spoon and stirred the hot liquid with languid grace.  "You were saying?" he prompted her.

     "Oh, erm, yes, sir," she stammered, startled.  She had been watching him stir his tea with envious fascination.  He was so casual, so graceful in his movement, much like Professor Snape.  Wherever _he _was.She ignored the wrenching pang the thought of her absent Potions Master produced and scrubbed her cheeks with her palms.  "I was just saying, sir, that I chatted with Colin Creevey in Hogsmeade." 

     "Yes, go on."

     She opened her mouth to oblige him, but then hesitated.  Her eyes darted to the corners of his office in search of cleverly concealed Listening Charms.  The probability of the Ministry surveillance machine having enough brass to bug the Headmaster's office without his knowledge or consent was infinitesimal, but after seeing Fudge prance into Professor Snape's classroom and attempt to arrest him in full view of onlooking, gape-mouthed students, she was convinced that his avaricious malice knew no bounds.

     She scanned the room, lingering over the corners and the dusty crevices of the bookshelf.  The Sorting Hat glowered morosely down at her from its perch atop one of the highest shelves, and she wondered idly if it was disappointed that it had never been given the opportunity to peruse her thoughts and ransack her mind in the name of proper placement.  She couldn't see why, and she supposed it was conceited of her to think that after being granted access to hundreds of thousands of worthier and greater minds than her own, it would care that it had not pillaged hers, but all the same, as her gaze drifted over the tatty rend that was its improbable mouth, she could not shake the suspicion that it resented her for being granted admission to these hallowed halls without its tacit mark of categorization.  A place for everything, and every thing in its place.

     The hat seemed to scowl at her, and she sneered in unconscious defiance.  Her thin lip was still curled as she shifted her roving eyes to the scores of portraits hung on the walls, all of whom returned her scrutiny with varying degrees of interest.  Several of them smiled indulgently at her, while still others eyed her with laconic amusement.  A dour, pointy-chinned man in Slytherin green frowned impressively at her from his frame beside the door, and the sneer on her face relaxed into a smirk.  An expression of furious, stewing displeasure _was_ a Slytherin trait, then.  She had been wondering about that.

     "Phineas Nigellus has been on the wall for a very long time, and I must say that I have never seen anyone look at him quite that way before," the Headmaster observed drily.

     She snapped her head in the direction of his voice, jolted from her fierce inspection.  "Sorry, sir.  I was just thinking about-never mind; it isn't important."

     Oh, but it was important, important and exquisitely painful.  The man in the picture reminded her of Professor Snape, from the haughty ghost of a smirk upon his lips to the flawless, regal posture to the billowing, elegant robes.  The similarities were so marked that part of her wondered if they were not somehow related in the distant past.  She closed her eyes and beat back a sudden wish to see Professor Snape come striding into the room, eyes alight with contempt and his voice a satin whip against her aching ears.

     _Wish I may, wish I might have this wish I wish tonight._

     "You were asking about Hogsmeade and Creevey."  She settled her gaze on the untouched cup of hot cocoa on the tray in front of her and willed the tantalizing thought away.   "I was just wondering about uninvited guests, sir," she muttered abruptly, and leaned forward to pick up the cup of cocoa.  It was tepid, and a thin, mottled scrim of milk floated at the top of the cup.

     "Ah."  Dumbledore sipped his tea.  "I can assure you that you may speak freely here."  He offered her an encouraging smile.

     Try as she might, she could not find it within herself to return it.  She took a dispirited sip of cocoa and studied the floor.  "Well, he was there the morning Potter collapsed.  He was bringing Professor Snape a message and knocked the phial of Harry's potion off the corner of the desk."  She shook her head.  "Damndest catch I ever saw.  That phial was upside down, and Colin never spilled a drop."  She fell silent and took another unenthusiastic sip.  "Don't blame him, though; Professor Snape would have had his head."

     _Oh, Jesus, I'm talking about him like he's dead and gone,_ she thought with sinking horror.  _Reminiscing for the dead._

     _He may very well be, and you have to face that._

_     I don't want to_, she thought fiercely, and the gritty aftertaste of cocoa was bitter in her mouth.  

     "Anyway," she continued roughly, "I thought that since Colin had touched the phial right before it was given to S-Harry, he might have noticed if something were amiss."  She stifled a humorless smirk; she had nearly blurted out "St. Potter".

     "And did he?" The Headmaster asked, his serene gaze suddenly sharp as he leaned forward in his chair.

     She, in turn, slumped wearily in hers.  "No, sir; absolutely nothing out of place according to him, but he also concedes that he wasn't looking for trouble, either."  She clutched her cup and stared at her feet.

     "No one was.  We were complacent," he murmured to no one in particular.

     She looked up, taken aback at such a frank admission, and was dismayed to see that he suddenly looked very old and very frail, the skin of his face creased and thin as papier mache, his eyes as bleak as her own, dark hollows inside his face.  She cursed herself for not being able bring him a glimmer of hope, and wished that there was something she could say or do to make it all right again.  If only she were stronger or faster or smarter.  If only she were normal.

     _Fat lot of good that will do you.  This is a mind game, not a wrestling match.  A pair of spry legs is about as useful as a rocket launcher._

_     Maybe so, but if I didn't have this hunk of metal strapped to my ass, I could hide and sneak, crouch in the shadows and eavesdrop._

_     As if the perpetrator is going to chat about poisoning the savior of the wizarding world over his morning tea, _her grandfather grumbled, and on the vivid canvas of her imagination, she saw him as he would have been in life, bent beneath the weight of years and clutching his hand-carved walking stick, his squat, blunted fingers fisted around a knobbled protrusion his penknife had missed.  Cloudy blue eyes stared disapprovingly at her from behind thick square spectacles, and his craggy, age-spotted jaw was set in a hard line of reproof.  Wisps of red hair streaked with white fluttered in an imagined breeze, the ancient, fragile plumes of an old and dying phoenix.

     _No, I suppose not._

_     So get off the agony wagon and concentrate on what you can do,_ the figure inside her head commanded.  _You're a bloody witch, after all.  _Make_ yourself invisible.  There's bound to be a spell for that._

     Flitwick would know, and if he doesn't, or can't say, there is always the library.

     She made a mental note to visit the library in the morning.  She was sure she would have time to visit before the first lesson of the day.  She never slept long anymore, woken well before dawn by nightmares she could not remember, but which left her drained and covered in a sticky sheen of sweat that not even the bath could cleanse.  She would simply forego the bath and head straight for the library.  Somewhere within the well-organized pantheon of shelves and musty, teetering stacks, she would find a spell to hide her from prying eyes.

     How ironic it was that after fifteen years of struggling to be seen, she now needed the anonymity she had come to loathe.  All the eyes that had learned to see her, reluctantly or otherwise, must be blinded again, indifferent to her presence.  She needed to turn them away, make them think she was as inconsequential as a tree stump or a stick of old furniture.  It would have been funny had it not been so terrible.  She laughed, a choked, humorless chuff that caught in her throat.

     "I have to go backward to go forward.  Whee," she muttered into her cup.

     "A most distressing phenomenon, is it not?" Dumbledore said quietly, and gave her a wan smile.

     She stared at him, her cup raised halfway to her lips.  "Has it ever happened to you, sir?"  She felt stupid even asking him such an invasive question, but the words escaped her lips before prudence could call them back.  She flushed.  "Sorry, sir.  I shouldn't have asked."  She took an enormous gulp of now-cold cocoa and grimaced as the slimy liquid washed over her tongue.

     To her surprise, he only smiled and removed his spectacles, polishing them on the sleeve of his robes.  "Indeed, it has, Miss Stanhope.  More often than I wish to consider, quite frankly, but I'm afraid it's unavoidable."  He replaced his spectacles and pushed them onto the bridge of his nose.

     She felt a surge of delicious relief at those words.  "I just feel like a lousy detective.  I don't even know where to start or what questions to ask or how to ask them.  I'm just afraid I'm going to mess things up with all these Aurors lurking around.  Especially that Umbridge cow.  I don't like her at all."  She set her teacup on the desk with a vehement clatter.

     "Surely you didn't expect to unravel the mystery in a single day?" the Headmaster asked gently, pushing his own empty teacup and saucer away.

     "No," she answered, much more sharply than she had intended, and she stopped and took a steadying, calming breath.  "No, sir," she continued when she had regained her composure.  "I didn't.  I knew it would be hard, the hardest thing I would ever do, but I didn't think it would be so hard to get started."  She sighed and harrowed her fingers through her hair.

     "I see.  Well, you must have questions."

     She snorted.  "Oh, yes, sir.  What questions don't I have?"

     "Some are more pressing than others, are they not?" he said, his eyes shrewd and wise behind his spectacles.

     "Of course.  What poisoned Harry?  Where did it come from?  Who put it there?  How?  Why?  When?  Because I know that Professor Snape didn't do it.  Speaking of Professor Snape, is he even still alive, or am I fighting for a ghost?"  She stopped, her chest heaving.  She realized that she was panting, and she was not at all surprised to find that she was perilously close to tears.

     _Brilliant.  Portrait of mental stability, you are._  She swiped fiercely at her aching eyes and stared at Dumbledore in mute, miserable defiance, daring him to mock her outburst.

     He was silent for a very long time, and with each second that passed, she grew surer that when he did speak, it would be to tell her that he had misjudged her, that she was not up to the task at hand, and though she knew her stomach would churn in outrage at the pronouncement, a small, childish part longed for it, craved the cocooning refuge of McGonagall's coddling skirts.  She blinked at him and waited.

     Finally, he folded his hands atop the desk and fixed her with a somnolent gaze.  "I believe I can answer two of your questions, Miss Stanhope, but before I do, I must ask one of my own."

     "Yes, sir?"  Her stomach was a coiled, burning knot.

     "You said you are absolutely certain that Professor Snape could not have done this.  Do you stand by this?"  

     The knot in her stomach loosened.  This was a question she could answer.  "Yes, I do," she answered without hesitation, her shoulders unconsciously straightening.  "Professor Snape would never be so stupid.  If he wanted to kill Potter, there are cleverer, more subtle ways of doing so, like slipping quinine into his dessert pudding.  If Harry keeled over then, he could blame it on shoddy cooking."

     "Been giving the matter a great deal of thought, have you?"

     She froze, realizing how that must have sounded.  "Oh, no, sir."  Then, after a pause, "Well, yes, sir, but not…not like that," she murmured hastily.

     "Oh, indeed not," the Headmaster agreed, and the shadow of a mischievous smile passed over his face.  She blushed.  "For what it is worth," he said, serious once more, "I agree whole-heartedly with you."

     "At least someone does," she muttered, and though she had meant to sound sardonic, it emerged as a weary, relieved sigh.

     "Alas, Professor Snape has not endeared himself to most of the students and teachers, I'm afraid."  He smiled ruefully.  "But that is neither here nor there.  I said I could answer two of your questions, and so I shall.  The poison that felled Harry is most likely cyanide."

     She stared at him, her heart beginning to gallop in her chest.  Here was something she could use, something she could hold in both greedy hands and investigate with books and further questions.  "Cyanide, sir?" she repeated, and her hands twined restlessly around the covered bars of the cage on her lap, the fingers opening and closing in a persistent, peristaltic rhythm.

     Her agitation did not go unnoticed.  "Does that mean something to you, Rebecca?"  The Headmaster sat straighter in his chair, his gaze cold steel.  

"N-," she began.

     But something niggled at the base of her brain, a bit of memory she could not place.  She had read about cyanide before, though she couldn't say where or why.  She remembered the book she had been reading, how it had crumbled beneath her fingers.  It had been heavy, and as she wrangled with the recollection, phantom weight settled onto her numb legs, added its bulk to the heft of the cage.

     _It was an essay, _she thought suddenly.  _An essay for Professor Snape.  You were looking for a subject that might interest him, and you came across that book.  You had gotten as far as cyanide before Neville and Seamus showed up.  They interrupted you before you could finish._

     _What was the name of the book?_  She groped for it, desperate to pull it from the obscuring cloud of forgetfulness, but it would not come.  It lodged just beyond the reach of her memory and offered her only a tantalizing flash of calligraphic script.  She lunged for it, but it faded, and she was left with a vertiginous, nauseated lightness in her stomach, the same weightless emptiness that had seized her as she plummeted toward the floor from the library landing that same morning.

     "I don't know, sir," she said at last.  "Maybe.  Maybe nothing.  I read about it once, and something about it…"  She hissed in frustration.

     "I do not expect you recall everything at once," he soothed.  "It is encouraging that you remember anything at all," he soothed.  "Now you have a starting point from which to answer the remaining questions which you have so eloquently put forth."

     Her lips twisted in a fleeting smile.  "I suppose the next question would be, 'where did the poison come from?'"  

     "Professor Snape has reason to believe it came from his stores."

     She gaped at him in incredulity.  "But how?  Professor Snape keeps all his toxins in a locked and warded cabinet, and he never leaves it unattended."  

     "That is the central question, isn't it, and as yet, I can find no answer."

     "Neither can I, sir," she said quietly.

     "However," he said briskly, "it won't do to concentrate on what we lack.  No, better to focus on what we have, don't you agree?"

     "Yes, sir."  She longed for her bed.

     "I told you I would answer two questions for you, and I will, but before I do, I'm afraid I must ask another small favor of you."

     She stifled a groan and eyed him in dutiful silence.  For someone who claimed to be sorry, he looked absolutely beatific.  He was beaming at her, his eyes radiating unspoken glee, and his fingers, though still pressed flat upon the desk, twitched, organic tuning forks quivering with the thrill of tremendous magic. Years had fallen away from his face, the lines and grooves scoured away by his eagerness.  In place of her wise Headmaster sat a mischievous boy keen to impart a secret, and she smiled in spite of her exhaustion.

     "Of course, sir," she said, and prayed she was up to whatever task he gave her.

     He opened a drawer and rummaged inside.  After a moment, he plucked something from inside it and closed it again.  "I was hoping you could look after something of great importance," he said, and handed her the object in his hand.

     It took her a full thirty seconds to register what she was seeing.  When she finally did, she began to shake, the tremors rattling her bones inside her skin, rolling from the soles of her feet to her solar plexus, and her hand spasmed around the piece of jade and silver it held.  There was a sharp prick and a bead of warmth in her palm; the tiny fang had pierced her flesh.

     "This is…is…," she stammered, unable to finish the thought that was filling her mind, emblazoning itself on her field of vision like a searing brand.  She could not stop staring at the glint of polished silver concealed within her shivering, twitching fingers.

     "Yes, it is," the Headmaster said mildly.  "Will you be so kind as to look after it until this mystery is solved?  Minister Fudge was most anxious that it be placed in trustworthy hands."

     She was speechless.  She gaped, first at her shaking fist, a fist that held Professor Snape's pride against her wounded palm, and then at the Headmaster, who was watching her in docile curiosity.  A strangled hiccough was all she could manage.

     "Miss Stanhope?" he pressed.  "May I count on you?"

     She nodded dumbly.  The power of coherent human speech had deserted her, and her tongue was as graceless as stone inside her mouth.  She pried her convulsing fingers from the gleaming metal that burned her hand like cold fire and stared at it.  The tiny jade eyes looked back at her in wordless rebuke.  _Professor Snape would never stand for such useless histrionics,_ the little snake seemed to say, and she bit back a spate of hysterical laughter.

     _Calm down.  No falling off the monkey bars now, of all times and places.  Breathe._

     She willed herself to relax, for the tremors to fade.  She took slow, deep breaths, and with each measured lungful of air, she imagined allspice and parchment dust and robes of puritanical black.  The vise grip that had crushed her chest in cold, cloying fingers eased, and as her thundering heartbeat returned to normal, she caught and fleeting glimpse of a chubby Auror writhing on the floor, his screams resounding off the impersonal walls of the Gryffindor Common room like infernal chamber music, and smiled.

     _He wasn't so lordly when we was finished with him,_ she heard him say, and looking down at the pin in her hand, she finally understood what he had meant.  Her hand snapped closed around the silver serpent in a savagely protective grip, and the floundering incredulity in the pit of her stomach was replaced by steely resolve and a terrible, detached rage.  There was only one thing left to know.

     "Is he-is Professor Snape dead?" she asked in a queer, flat voice.  All feeling seemed to have abandoned her, and save for the precious bit of metal pressed into her palm by sweaty fingers, she was unable to feel the rest of her body.  She kept her gaze locked on the Headmaster's face, sure that if she looked down, she would find that she had left her mangled body behind like a shriveled husk.

     The Headmaster made no answer.  Instead, he rose from his desk and pocketed his wand.  "Leave the owl here, Miss Stanhope, and come with me.  I will have a house elf deliver it to the owlery for you.  And keep that out of sight; it wouldn't do to have it seen."  He gestured at the pin.

     She placed her owl on the floor in front of his desk and stuffed the pin into the pocket of her robes, but she did not let it go.  She clutched it between feverish fingers, afraid that if she let it go, it would vanish like tendrils of wood smoke, a cruel mirage born of frantic wish.   She gripped her control stick and rolled to where the Headmaster waited, his hand resting lightly on the doorknob.

     "Before we go, a bit of magic," he said, and with that he pulled out his wand and tapped her once on the thin crown of her head.

     _Heated aloe,_ she thought as the sensation washed over her in a sluggish, gelatinous wave.  _It's like the aloe treatments the nurses used to give you when they thought you might be getting bedsores.  _

     It was not unpleasant, being wrapped in this viscous, warm cocoon, and she gave the fingers of her steering hand an experimental wiggle as the gelid heat oozed sedately down her bony forearm and twined itself seductively around her fingers.  She was startled to realize that, though the outline of her fingers was still perfectly visible, she could see the worn, cracked knob of her control stick through them.  She was, it appeared, transparent.

     _The Amazing Invisible Girl,_ she thought, her invisible fingers thrumming with awed excitement.  _Too bad you can still see the chair._

No sooner had the thought crossed her mind then the chair, too, began to dissolve.  The control stick shimmered, as though she were seeing it through a veil of torpid desert heat, and then the room swallowed it up.  Or so it seemed.  One minute it was there, and the next she was goggling at the stone floor, the metal shaft to which the control stick was affixed jabbing the air like splintered bone.

     The armrests went next, followed in quick succession by the seat, footrests, back and wheels, and as each part disappeared, she expect to fall to the floor in an ungainly heap, scrawny, flailing limbs akimbo, but her skinny shanks remained firmly planted three feet above the floor in defiance of all logic.  An ebullient giggle escaped her.

     "Quite splendid, isn't it?  I find it most convenient for patrolling the castle and grounds late at night," he said cheerfully.  "Off we go, then."  He opened the door and stepped onto the spiraling staircase.

     She followed obediently and winced when the guiding magnets gave a preternaturally loud click.

     "Oh, dear.  I had quite forgotten about that."  The Headmaster's voice floated out of the darkness from somewhere ahead and to the right of her.  "Nothing another Charm cannot remedy.  _Silencio wheelchair!"_

     There was a brilliant stream of purple light from the Headmaster's wand, and by its luminescent, wavering glow, she saw the distorted profile of his face and twin dots of cobalt blue.  His eyes.  They reminded her of spirit lights, ghosts of the devil's sprites sent to lure unsuspecting souls to their doom, and she was suddenly afraid, but then the swirling stairs and his face were plunged into obscurity once more, and the moment passed.

     It was a surreal experience, rolling soundlessly down the corridor behind the Headmaster.  Had not the edges of the pin she clutched so ferociously bitten into the tender flesh of her palm, she would have thought herself a ghost, but the minute heft of it throttled between her fingers kept her from succumbing to the illusion.  She stayed as close as she dared, the tread of her front wheels scant inches from the hem of his robes, and more than once she was tempted to stretch forth her fingers and brush them against the smooth, shifting fabric, to reassure herself that she was still of this world, but that would mean surrendering her grip on the pin in her pocket, and that was a physical impossibility, and so she rolled on.

     "Good evening."  The Headmaster inclined his head to a young Auror lurking stalwartly outside the Corridor leading to the dungeons.  The Auror made no reply, his face a mask of cool disdain, and from her vantage point, she saw him tighten his grip on his wand.

     _Bastard, _she thought savagely, not because he had disrespected Dumbledore-in truth, she gave less than a damn about that-but because he was one of _them_, one of the soulless, blue-robed tyrants that had a hand in wresting the serpent in her hand from its rightful place on Professor Snape's collar.  The lips she no longer had pulled from her teeth in a feral snarl of undisguised loathing, and her sweaty hand crushed the serpent.  She was seized with the mad urge to charge him, to loose a primal, guttural bay of bloodlust and fly at him, ram the full force of her chair into his shins and listen as the bones shattered with a sound like breaking china.  She would caper and gibber while he howled and clutched legs as mangled useless as hers, and before his cohorts came to drag her away to the forgotten bowels of Azkaban, she would spit in his face and laugh.

     Tempting as the vision was, she knew it would achieve nothing, and so, with a pang of bilious regret, she settled for sparing him a flat, sidelong gaze and kept moving.  The Headmaster, undaunted by the Auror's unrepentant rudeness, trundled into the Potions corridor, and as she followed in his wake, she wondered what question he hoped to answer by bringing her here.  Aside from the fact that Professor Snape no longer presided over it, the classroom had changed not a whit. 

     _Well, that changes everything, doesn't it?_

     Yes, yes, it does.

     But what difference did it make?  Different as the classroom may have become psychologically, everything about it was as it had ever been.  The desks and benches were unmoved, as were the alembics and spare cauldrons.  The Headmaster took special care to be sure that the stores remained alphabetized and neat, just as Professor Snape had always kept them.  She had been in the classroom since the Aurors had stormed the castle like a horde of rapacious locusts, and she had noted absolutely nothing out of the ordinary beyond the oppressive absence of her customary taskmaster.

     _Have you really been looking?  Methinks your eyes have been so distracted by what is missing that you cannot see what is _there_.  Perhaps it's time to take a fresh look._

     What was there to find?  It was doubtless the Aurors had scoured every nook and cranny of that room in search of evidence and further indictment against their intended quarry, and whatever was to be found had been carted away for closer scrutiny at their leisure as the pondered ways to turn it to their favor.  The three key pieces of evidence-Potter, the phial, and the hapless Professor Snape-had been dispersed to the four winds, and the traces of the crime that might have remained after the Aurors had departed had long since been scrubbed away by industrious house elves and oblivious, trampling feet, including her own churning wheels.

     _You never know,_ her mind persisted.  _Maybe it will jog your memory._

     She had little hope for that, tired as she was, but she would do it anyway, if for no other reason than the Headmaster wanted her to, and it was better than sitting idly by while time marched inexorably onward.  She would wander around the room and try to remember anything other than bleak obsidian eyes and classmates with lupine faces and bloody, gaping jaws.  She might even crawl over the frozen stone floor, scrape her knees raw as she made furious, hopeless obeisance to the ghosts within the walls, and maybe, just maybe, if she offered enough flesh, a piece of the puzzle would fall into place.

     They neared the Potions classroom and she slowed in anticipation, but to her surprise, he continued down the corridor to another door.  The door to Professor Snape's quarters, as a matter of fact.

     _Here?  What are we doing here?  _Her heart hammered against her ribcage, and her throat felt dry and scalded.  _We shouldn't be here.  They won't like it._

     They, of course, were the pair of Aurors that had been stationed outside the door since Professor Snape was relieved of his duties.  She had seen them both before; Dawlish had been with Madam Toad on the night of her questioning, and the other had been present on the day Professor Snape had been unceremoniously ousted from his classroom.  She despised the former, a spineless sycophant, and as to the latter, he earned her unbridled loathing by virtue of the robes he wore.  She scowled at both of them and veered closer to Dumbledore, unnerved despite her invisibility.

     "Good evening, Kingsley," murmured the Headmaster, and the tall, black Auror gave a genteel nod.

     "Headmaster," he responded.

     "Dawlish," Dumbledore greeted the other, his voice considerably cooler.

     For a moment, Dawlish continued to stare stonily at the torch on the opposite wall, and then he turned his head, his movement a slow, delirious arc.  His mouth wrenched itself into a semblance of a smile, and before his lips slackened anew, she saw a flash of angry red gums.  

     "Headmaster."  Dawlish gave a jerky nod.

     _Something's wrong with him,_ she thought flatly.  _He's had a stroke.  He wasn't like this before.  _

     She stared at him.  With his close-cropped grey hair, glazed eyes, and corpse-like grimace, he reminded her of Howdy Doody in the hands of a madman, and she shifted uneasily in her seat.  The Headmaster, however, showed no demonstrable concern for the slack-jawed Auror.  He simply opened the door, stepped inside, and bade her follow him.

     "Headmaster," she said as soon as he closed the door behind her, "there's something wrong with-,"

     But just then, she caught sight of the figure on the sofa, and all questions withered in her throat.  The serpent pin escaped her nerveless grasp and slithered to the furthest corner of her pocket.  She was only dimly aware of the Headmaster muttering "_Finite incantatem!" _and grazing his wand over her scalp.  The world had narrowed to black robes and a starched white collar, to elegant alabaster fingers and smoldering black eyes.       

     "Professor Snape," she croaked.

   __


	41. Matters of Polish and Poison

Chapter Forty-one

     Snape stared at Rebecca, his face an inscrutable mask of cool disinterest.  She was nestled in her improbable conveyance, swallowed by it, in fact, and he could see the fingers of one hand opening and closing, groping uselessly for something in the pocket of her robes.  She was gaping at him with the unmistakable awe of one who has lain eyes on the resurrected dead.

     She was thinner than the last time he had seen her, though he would not have thought it possible, her cheekbones brittle pikes beneath her skin.  Her hair was no longer the improbable, dazzling gold he remembered, but a dull, tarnished brass, limp and brittle.  Only her eyes were the same, driven and bright as polished sapphire in her pasty, drawn face.  She was currently watching him with rapt amazement, but he was certain that once the shock abated, she would regain her customary disquieting, _knowing_ countenance.  At least he hoped she would.  He needed some shred of normality in the unrelenting madness his life had become.

     "Professor Snape," she said again, and her voice was a strangled, reedy wheeze.  Her fingers snapped convulsively around the fabric of her robes, and all the color had drained from her face.

     "I am well aware of my identity," he snapped.  "You look appalling."

     Her reaction was not what he expected.  Instead of flinching from his scourging tongue, she clapped a hand over her mouth and screamed laughter, doubling over until the tips of her hair grazed the scuffed toes of her trainers.  Her other hand remained rooted in the pocket of her robes, opening and closing like blind pincers.

     _Bloody girl has gone to pieces.  _Then, on the heels of that thought.  _She sounds oddly relieved._

     He rose from the sofa and crossed the room in half a dozen strides, his robes billowing behind him like onrushing night.  He stopped in front of her and crouched until his eyes were level with the crown of her head.  It shook softly with the force of her hysterical mirth, a parched wheat field in the throes of a monumental earthquake, and this close, he could hear the soft, desperate intake of breath before it was expelled in another gale of laughter.

     "How pleased I am to note your pleasure at my present circumstances," he hissed, each word as quick and stinging as a slap.  He rocked back on his heels and waited for her to respond.

     The keening laughter ceased in mid-warble, as though an invisible hand had seized her throat, and she lifted her head to meet his gaze.  Her eyes were red-rimmed and moist, and the fading outline of her fingers was still visible at the corners of her mouth, where she had pressed them into her thin flesh in an effort to regain her composure.

     _Not totally cracked, then_, he thought, and though he would never admit it, even to himself, he was relieved.

     "Pleasure at your present circumstances, sir?" she repeated quietly, as though he were speaking in tongues.  She swiped a hand across her eyes and straightened in her chair.  "Absolutely not.  I just didn't expect to find you here."

     "Oh?  Why ever not?  These are my chambers, after all."  He gestured carelessly to the barren walls and austere furnishings.  "Or have you forgotten?" he sneered.

     "Of course not, sir."  All traces of hysteria had vanished, though she was still gazing at him with wary reverence.  "I just thought you might be elsewhere."

     He did not need to ask her where "elsewhere" might be.  "You were hoping that I was in Azkaban, then, writhing and screaming in my own piss?" he spat at her, and he felt a lurid pang of satisfaction when she flinched and grew paler still at the thought.  She was not, as he had begun to fear, inured to him, not yet complacent.  Good.

     "Severus," the Headmaster murmured in gentle reprimand.

     He ignored him and grasped a hank of her hair, dry as straw between his squeezing fingers.  He let it drop in disgust, stood, and whirled to face the Headmaster, who was standing unobtrusively in the corner.

     "So this is my champion?"  He jabbed an incredulous, accusatory finger at the hunched child behind him.  "This is my salvation?" he scoffed.  "Clap me in irons and have done with it, if you please," he snarled, and thrust out his arms.

     "Melodrama hardly becomes you, Severus," was the Headmaster's only reply, and Snape sputtered in inarticulate fury.  His head throbbed with the terrible promise of a migraine, and he reached up to knead fiercely at his temples.

     _No Anti-Ache powder, either.  Fudge and his merry bastards took everything, even the all-purpose flour and the sugar._

     "Melodrama?" he murmured through gritted teeth, and a vein in his temple pulsed dangerously.  "Here I sit, a prisoner in my own rooms, at the mercy of a feckless twit and his slavering minions, and you chide me for my melodrama?"  He snorted and ran his fingers through his hair.

     "There will be no irons for you," the Headmaster countered reasonably, and scratched the bridge of his nose.

     "Why?  Because of this sainted chit?"  He favored Rebecca with a derisive sneer.  "Look at her.  She's a wreck."

     The Headmaster looked from him to Rebecca and smiled.  "Appearances can be most deceiving, as well you know," he said.  If I am not mistaken, she has already surpassed your expectations on a number of occasions, and I expect she shall do so again.  Now, I must be off; I've a favor to ask of Sinistra, and I'd like to catch her before her next Astronomy practical.  I'll leave you to it."

     "Leave me to what, Headmaster?" he demanded, as Dumbledore swept to the door in a swish of red-robed beneficence.

     "As you are her professor, I will leave _that_ to your discretion, though I am certain you have much to discuss."  With that enigmatic pronouncement, he disappeared through the doorway and dissolved into the waiting shadows of the corridor.

     _A pox on him and his blasphemous optimism,_ he thought savagely as the door closed with a furtive _snick._

     The Headmaster's parting words echoed in his ears.  _As you are her professor…_  The mocking phrase scalded his ears, and he swore under his breath.  He was no longer anyone's professor, as Fudge and Albus himself had made quite plain.  A Prefect had more authority than he did.  What did he expect him to do with her?  Teach her?  A farce, that.  Even if he wished to-which he most assuredly did not-he had not so much as a pot to his name.

     He turned and found that she was watching him intently.  The slack-jawed amazement had departed, and in its stead was the familiar stoic, solemn curiosity.  Gone, too, was the frenetic clutching of her pocket.  Both hands were folded on her lap, clasped primly over bony knees.  She was watching, waiting, gazing at him through considering, half-lidded eyes.

     It infuriated him.  She had no right to be here, to see him disgraced, stripped of his rank and left with nothing but what the Ministry and Albus' charity deigned to allow him.  Merlin only knew what she was thinking behind the cloistered citadel of her face.  Perhaps, behind that bland gaze, she was laughing, reveling in the fact that the tormentor had so suddenly and decisively become the tormented.  

     A vision arose in his mind of her in the Gryffindor Common Room, surrounded by her wide-eyed Housemates as she regaled them with the tale of his imprisonment, laughing as she told them of his emptied bookshelves and his barren cupboards.  Her lips were curved in a savage, triumphant leer, and her canines glistened with saliva.  Her eyes were polished glass inside her face, and her malice afforded her an eerie radiance.  _Shoe's on the other foot now_, the phantom Rebecca crowed to Ron Weasley, and the raw glee in her voice made his stomach churn.

     _If she's enjoying the proceedings, she is hiding it remarkably well_, countered his professorial logic.  _She's held together by miracle and temerity beyond reason.  A good shove will break her in half._

     But he shoved the voice aside.  He did not want to hear it.  It was much easier, much more comforting to believe that her presence here was another elaborate joke on the part of House Gryffindor than to entertain the notion that she truly wanted to help him.  The former was a dynamic he understood.  Gryffindor was the House that had crushed the feeble hopes of his youth into powder, had spawned the hellions that for twenty-six years had dictated the path of his life.  From the age of eleven, it had been the embodiment of _them_, the oppressive, privileged elite that destroyed the dreams of those they deemed unworthy and trampled them into the dust.  He had seen firsthand their fairness, their idea of justice, and he knew in the embittered marrow of his bones that she was here for no good purpose.

     _What if she is?  She's shown herself to be anything but amenable to Minerva's "guidance".  Indeed, she loathes it.  Isn't it possible that, just this once, there are no ulterior motives, that what you see is what you get?_

     Balderdash.  There was no such thing as charity for charity's sake.  There was always another face beneath the smiling façade of succor freely given, a hidden price that must always be paid, whether it be in Galleons or in blood.  That was the first lesson he had learned as a Death Eater, and the fundamental truth of it had never yet been controverted.  Even Albus, with all his lofty, seductive talk of friendship and trust and sacrifice for higher ideals, only wished to save him now because he was useful as a spy.  The old man could tell himself otherwise all he wished, and he, Snape, could cling to the myth with both hands, but all the wistful desire in the world would not mask the ugly, ignominious reality of the situation.

     What she wanted, he could not say, nor did he care.  It was enough to know that she wanted and that she would not find it here.  He would not be another feather in the well-decorated Gryffindor cap, another trophy at which they could point and proclaim their magnanimity.  The House that had torn him down would not build him up again.  He would not allow it.

     "Well," he snarled, and her gaze, which had begun to drift, sharpened.

     "Yes, sir?"  Alert, respectful, eager.

     He scowled.  "Have you found my salvation?" he demanded, irritated by her renewed aplomb.

     Her wasted face darkened.  "No, sir.  I wish I had."  Plaintive and exhausted.  "Every answer leads to another question."  She brushed a strand of hair from her face with one withered, blue-nailed finger.  "All I know for certain is that someone set you up."

     "Oh, splendid.  Come, Miss Stanhope, let us take this illuminating revelation to Fudge.  I'm sure that, as you are a member of the illustrious Gryffindor House, your testimonial will lead to my immediate release.  I am saved."  He folded his arms across his chest and stared down at her in undisguised disgust.

     She had the decency to blush, but she did not cower, and when she spoke again, her voice was steady and clear.  "Headmaster Dumbledore says you think it was cyanide that poisoned Harry, cyanide from your stores."  Her fingers curled around her control stick in a dreamy, hypnotic rhythm.

     He gritted his teeth and gave a jerky nod.  "So it would seem."

     "But how can that be, sir?  That cabinet is locked and warded when not in use.  How could someone enter it without your knowledge?"

     "If I knew the answer to that question, I wouldn't be here," he hissed, and turned away from her.  He was tired of her puerile questions, and he wanted her to go away.

     "Forgive me, sir.  I was thinking out loud," she said, and her unflappable civility inflamed his already smoldering temper.

     He rounded on her with unrepentant savagery, his hands fisted at his sides.  "I have no interest whatsoever in your thought processes, you mangled, unwholesome creature.  You have been an anathema from the moment you fouled my classroom for the first time, and since then, you have failed to demonstrate anything remotely resembling intellect.  I have wasted three and a half months of my too-short life trying to teach you to brew a Camoflous Draught, a potion any fifth-year should be able to achieve, and yet, despite my private tutelage, you have made not one iota of improvement.  Even Neville Longbottom, incompetent as he is, has done better.  So tell me, Miss Stanhope, why should I listen to a word that comes out of your malformed mouth?"

     She goggled at him, and he knew from the bright, uncomprehending pain in her eyes and the pinched, bleached complexion of her gaunt face that he had struck his mark, that she had not raised her formidable defense.  In all likelihood, she had seen no reason to do so.  In the month prior to his incarceration, they had reached a bizarre truce, an unspoken agreement.  In an instant, he had shattered it, broken it with the velvet iron of his tongue, and her Gryffindor sensibilities had clearly not prepared her for it.  

     _Not fair, not fair,_ chanted a voice inside his head, and amid the maelstrom of anger and the blind desire to inflict hurt was a spark of shame, but it was overwhelmed by the fury built up over nearly a week of isolated privation, and it guttered and died before reason could reassert itself.

     _Now she knows what betrayal tastes like, _he thought ruthlessly as he gazed into eyes wide as tea saucers.  _Did she expect that I would drop to my knees and kiss her twisted feet in sniveling gratitude?  So sorry to disappoint her._

     She opened her mouth to respond, but he cut her off.  He had to finish it.  If he were going to be beholden to yet another Gryffindor, then he would exact his pound of flesh.  "Is it not what you expected?" he purred in feigned sympathy.  "Did you perhaps think that I would be grateful for your meddling, pleased to see you?  Much as it pains me to deprive you of your adolescent fantasies of being my knight in shining armor, I must tell you that the five days I've spent without your malignant presence have been the most relaxing and peaceful I've known.  I don't want you here, nor do I want your help.  Take your Gryffindor sanctimony and your sense of entitlement and get out," he snapped, his voice little more than an icy whisper.

     She was perfectly still, and she was staring at him in agonized disbelief.  "Professor-,"

     He tried to stop himself, to rein in his venomous temper, but he was too far gone.  The need to break her, make her as wretched and miserable as he was a mania, an erotic compulsion he could not ignore.  He was not her teacher now; there could be no official sanction from Albus or anyone else, and all he could see was the Gryffindor crest sewn onto her robes, bright as a beacon for all his festering resentment.  He made a final effort to hold his tongue.  He pressed his lips together as a barrier against that which, once said, could never be unsaid, but the dry flesh of his lips was no match for his misplaced hatred, and in the end, he let them pass.

     "I am not your professor, and I never was," he spat, and the shame returned, stronger now.  He smothered it with an impatient snort.  He had gone too far to turn back now.  "See yourself out and do not blight my chambers again."

     "But sir, they'll see me," she said in a small, crushed voice.

     "That is not my concern," he said coldly, and spun away from her.

     _Too far!  Too far!_ shrieked the weary voice of his conscience, and he swallowed against a wave of nausea.  In his mind's eye, he saw her in the infirmary on the day she had burned his legs.  Her face was in her hands, and tears of contrition coursed down her face like blood, the first honest tears anyone had ever had the audacity to shed for him.

     _And this is her reward._

_     Come, child, I will not harm thee.  I carry only death in my arms._  Damnation's lullaby.

     He spared her a last blank gaze before he retreated to his study and slammed the door in her stricken face.   When the heavy door closed with a doleful creak and hid her shocked face from view, he tottered to his bed and sank on to the hard, unyielding mattress.  His legs, he found with no surprise whatsoever, were numb.  He let out a ragged breath and buried his head in his hands.

     The shame was bitter bile in his throat, and try as he might, he could not swallow it away.  He strained his ears, listening for the telltale sounds of wounded grief-sussurating, ragged breath, wet sniffles, the stifled keen of a rabbit caught in a hopeless snare-but there was nothing, not even the forlorn growl of her chair.  If she was there, she was being silent as a ghost.

     _She'd be damned before she let you see her break beneath your ruthless tongue, and you know it.  She'd strangle on it, the stubborn little chit, and won't that be fun if Albus or Kingsley should stumble in and find her dead on the floor, purple as an overripe plum, tongue lolling from her slack mouth like a dead earthworm?  Oh, yes.  The Ministry would sing as they carried you away.  Not to mention what Albus would think._

     He scrubbed his face with his hands and wished with all his might that there was still a bottle of rye in night table drawer, but it was long gone, confiscated by Aurors along with everything else.  He knew he should go out and do _something_, but he had no idea what, and the only sensible option-apology-was simply beyond him, appropriate as it might have been.  Even Albus, his beloved and hated father figure, was hard-pressed to get one from him, and the man was singularly responsible for saving his worthless life.  Even if he could have mustered a half-hearted, meaningless plea for forgiveness, his legs still refused to move, lifeless as stilts below the knee.

     "Salazar's balls," he muttered, and began to rock back and forth on the edge of the bed.  "Salazar's ballssalazar'sballssalazar'sballs."

     She hadn't deserved that, not by any stretch of the imagination.  Indeed, she had behaved as she always had, as though nothing had changed and she was simply there to consult her professor.  She had even addressed him as such, something only Shacklebolt continued to do.  To everyone else, he had become "Severus," or, more demeaning still, "you".  By her staunch, eye-popping intractability, she had brought a shred of normality into the chaos, wrapped in that one word.  _Professor.  I am still here_, it had said, _and I, at least, am unchanged.  I am ready to begin the game anew._

     For all that, he was furious with her, not just because she had been allowed to see him at his lowest ebb, but because, in the heart-stopping seconds after he had first heard her voice and turned to see her there with Albus, gaunt and irascible as ever, he had been glad to see her, filled with a heady relief so profound that his legs had turned to water and it had been all he could do not to seize her by her scrawny arm to be sure that she was real.  The realization that he had _wanted _to see her appalled and frightened him.  It meant that she had gouged a chink in his supposedly impenetrable fortress.

     So he had seized the first and truest weapon at his now limited disposal and vented all of his fury on her unsuspecting head, made the cruelest of cuts in an attempt to drive her away.  He did not want to wish for her, to admit that, in the deepest recess of his mind, he had been hoping she would come, if for no other reason than he would no longer be alone with his thoughts and his suppurating hatred.  He had been alone all of his life, and now, on ground that should have been as familiar as the contours of his own face, when the previous thirty-seven years of isolation should have served him best, all his safeguards were failing.

     _Because you weren't really alone.  You could have returned from your self-imposed exile at any time.  All you had to do was reach out your hand, and someone-Albus, like as not-would have taken it.  You were alone because you _chose_ to be.  Now there is no choice, and there is a world of difference between isolation by choice and being alone because there is no other way.  It has been taken from your hands, and you, who have always prided yourself on your ability to choose, even when you made the worst choices to be made, cannot stand it._

_     So you lashed out at the nearest target, because that was a choice you could still make, and now you're ashamed of your cowardice because you know that if you manage to lever yourself off this bed and open the door, she will still be there, swollen eyes and all.  And if you order her to follow you, she will say, _yes, sir_ and come without batting an eyelash.  She has decided to help you, come what may, so it's safe to hurt her, isn't it?_

He snorted.  She would, at that.  He had no doubt that she was still out there, still as marble in her chair and waiting for him to open the door.  He could scream and curse and scourge her all he liked, and it would change nothing as far as she was concerned.  She had made up her mind, and her mind was all but impossible to change.  Merlin knew he had tried, with his detentions and his brutality and his casual malice, and in the end, it had been his mind that had changed, been torn, kicking and screaming, from its nest of comfortable prejudice and forced to see her as something other than a set of rubber wheels and a waste of misaligned flesh.

     _Sweet, screaming Merlin_, he thought, and laughed, a harsh, brittle caw.  _She's raving.  Any sane pupil would have been overjoyed to be rid of me._

     _Yes, and you are glad of it._

     He pushed the thought aside.  "Stubborn, mad, unwaveringly foolish strip of a girl," he said to the empty room.  

     The only response was an indolent pop from the torch housed in a rusty bracket above his wardrobe, and he watched as a shower of sparks swirled in the frigid air like fireflies for an instant and then flickered into darkness.  His gaze followed the cinders as they drifted lazily to the floor and scattered over the dusty top of the wardrobe.  There was no danger of fire; he had Charmed all of his furniture against fire upon first moving into the castle.

     It was ludicrous to be musing upon his strange relationship with his gnarled, enigmatic pupil when he had matters of far graver import to ponder, namely the ominous and protracted silence of both Voldemort and Lucius Malfoy.  The skull and serpent seared into the flesh of his forearm had not throbbed and burned since before the start of term, and save the brief and pittering missive from Lucius about Draco's wholly unsurprising decision to join the ranks of the Death Eaters, there had been no correspondence from Malfoy Manor.

     Nor was there likely to be.  Not with Aurors nosing about.  Though Albus was most assuredly trying to keep the Ministry enquiry out of the press and avoid the avalanche of reporters that would no doubt descend upon the school gates the moment they learned The-Boy-Who-Lived might not very much longer, it was a given that every Slytherin worth his Sorting had dashed off a report of the affair to their parents, and Draco, whatever else he might have been, was undeniably every inch the Slytherin.  Even if the boy had shown an appalling lack of judgment and failed to send a letter, word would have reached Lucius from the tightly woven gossip network of wealthy Slytherin wives.  Lucius was an unrepentant misogynist, but he knew a useful tool when he saw one and never missed an opportunity to pump Narcissa for information gleaned from the chatter of the ladies' drawing room after one of their lavish soirees.

     If ignorance was not his excuse, then it stood to reason that Lucius had not written because he had chosen to sever his ties with him, no pun intended.  And he knew very well what that meant.  Voldemort was wearying of him.  The lies and half-truths and tight-lipped avowals of loyalty were no longer working, and he was growing suspicious.  His, Snape's time was running out, and Lucius, always the first to smell blood in the water, was distancing himself.  _His_ loyalty, after all, had never been in doubt-it was and had always been to himself.

     _From the frying pan to the fire.  If, whether by the machinations of the changeling outside my door or sheer dumb luck, I escape the deadly, greedy caress of a Dementor, I'll have another, more patient executioner waiting for me, and my death will not be quick._

     Were it not for the fact that the surrender of his life would be used as a grim trophy with which to pad that imbecile Fudge's inauspicious laurels, he would have confessed to whatever they wished to hear, including the death of Merlin if it made them happy.  But he knew his penance was not yet finished, and if he was to die, he would rather die a reviled, traitorous bastard than a martyr unnoticed.

     _You could always refuse the summons._

He snorted.  It was physically possible to resist the summons, it was true.  Karkaroff, the coward, had done so last year.  There would be a price, of course, pain beyond calculation, but if you could weather the agony, you could stay away.  Resisting the psychological impulse was another matter altogether. His hand strayed to his left forearm and kneaded the scarred flesh there in an attempt to soothe away old memories.

     He hated the Dark Lord and his blind, unquestioning followers.  Each meeting he attended for the past fifteen years had been spent trying to keep the sneer off his face and the hatred from burning a hole in his guts.  Even the air he breathed tasted different there, tainted and foul, greasy on his tongue, and more than once he had fought the urge to retch as he bent to kiss scabrous feet, hard as ivory beneath his trembling lips.

     And yet he could not forget that he had once been one of them, just as eager and full of fanatical zeal, could not resist the faint, dusty stirrings of kinship as he stood or kneeled with them.  His reasons had not truly been their reasons, but that hardly mattered.  What mattered was that he understood them, even after the distance of years, and the faded empathy drew him in even as it repulsed him.

     And then there was Albus.  If he refused to go and cowered here in the castle, Albus would lose his eyes and ears into the inner circle, myopic and hindered as they might be, and he wanted to give the venerable old soul all the advantage he could before they struck him down.  What was more, he was always afraid that if he didn't go, if he shirked his terrible duty, then he would miss the one important clue that would end the killing once and for all, as well as the single, shining shred of atonement that would let him rest at last.  So he would go when the inevitable summons came, even if it meant he would not return.

     This train of thought served only to increase the knots of tension in his neck and shoulders, so he pushed it away and scowled at his still-nerveless knees.  He wanted to do something to distract his mind from the matters of his ultimate fate and the child hovering silently in his parlor like a sentinel ghost, but he could not find the energy to rise from his bed.  He was so tired, not just physically, but emotionally.  His hearty reserves of the famed British stiff upper lip were all but depleted, and he was as lost and frightened and furious as he had been as a fifteen-year-old boy, when Potter and his friends had driven him to his knees and filled his mouth with soap just because they could.

     "Potter," he spat dispiritedly, "always Potter."

     His gaze landed on the shadowy outline of his boots in the wardrobe.  They were his oldest and most cherished pair, bought with Galleons from his first wages as a Hogwarts professor.  The Aurors would have taken them had they known of their personal significance, but to them, they had only been worn bits of leather and wood, and so they remained undisturbed, a symbol of covert triumph, a knowledge that they had not taken all of him away with them.

     He suddenly wanted to polish them, to work the leather in his hands and feel it yield beneath his fingers.  Top to bottom in thoughtful, sensuous circles, his fingers scraping over the delicate leather, the sensitive tips covered in bootblack.  His hands would work, and his mind would drift, and perhaps his subconscious would disentangle the snarled threads of his thoughts, ease the cramp of misery in his chest.  

     It had always been that way.  When he was a small boy, before Potter and his friends had crushed his love for Quidditch, it had been a broom he had polished, an ancient but immaculate Cleansweep 450.  He had spent countless weekend hours closeted in the school broom shed with a rag and a can of polish, crouched in the cool dirt, inhaling the stale odors of old straw and rat droppings and the brighter, more vital scent of the polish, humming tunelessly as he let his hands drift and his mind wander happier paths.  Later, after Quidditch had soured, it had been cauldrons he tended.  Then, at twenty, it had been the boots, all black leather and respectability, and three times a week for the past seventeen years, he had polished them, let them carry him away from his troubles.

     It was an alluring idea, but his legs refused to cooperate.  He tried to stand, only to find that they were stiff, ungainly as marble.  He swore at them and at the unwanted burden of inexplicable conscience that had no doubt precipitated the mutiny.  It had been a scolding, not a lynching, and they-and he-were being ridiculous.  He flopped onto the bed again with a teeth-clacking thump, and his feet, bloodless as stone, prickled, minute darning needles against the soles of his feet.  He stomped them on the stone floor to further encourage the return of sensation.

     _Call her in to fetch them.  You might as well do _something _with her if she's going to be here all night.  At the very least, you can see if she'll come._

_     Rebecca Stanhope, knight-errant and homely handmaiden, _he thought, and spluttered in sour amusement.  _I've no need to see if she'll come; I already know she will._

     Maybe, but it'll will keep her from nosing about your private quarters without supervision.

     She wouldn't dare, and he knew it.  She was too obedient, too attuned to his temperament to be so recklessly foolish.  

     _Too respectful?_

     That, too.  His lip curled in disgust at the unspoken admission, but the voice had given him the excuse he needed to ask for her company without conceding that he longed for it.

     "Stanhope," he barked.

    Rebecca, who had been sitting resolutely in the same spot in which he had so unceremoniously left her, turned her head at the sound of his voice.  The tears that had been threatening to spill from her aching eyes remained unshed, and without stopping to consider the angry, betrayed voice inside her head screaming for her to ignore him, she rolled to the door that led to his bedroom and study.

     She leaned forward until her lips were scant inches from the door, and she wrinkled her nose at the memory of old varnish.  "Yes, sir?"

     "Stop nosing about my private quarters and get in here," came his voice from behind the door.

     She leaned back and snorted.  It had never occurred to her _to _go poking through his meager possessions.  Prison or not, this was still his home, and willing as she might have been to cast the rules of decency and fairness aside for everyone else, she could not forget them here, with him.  She was, whether he liked it or not, acknowledged it or not, still his pupil, and she would hold him in all the esteem a professor deserved.

     She took a deep breath, reached out, and twisted the tarnished doorknob between frozen fingers.  It was glacial here in the dungeons, and her blood was sluggish in her veins.  Each breath was suspended for an instant in the air, and when her stiff fingers brushed the heavy knob, the cold sank jagged teeth into her knuckles.  The door swung open with a gentle displacement of air, and by the dim light from the torches in the parlor, she saw her Potions Master.

     His face was little more than dim fancy looming out of the shadows, but his eyes were as vibrant as ever, onyx fire in the gloom, and they were fixed unblinkingly upon her face.  She sensed movement and heard the faint shift of wool, but he made no move to rise.  Instead, his fingers harrowed through his hair and descended to his lap again.  He did not speak.  He simply stared at her.  She closed the door behind her, folded her hands over her knees, and waited.

     "Well, come closer," he hissed, and scowled at her.

     "Yes, sir."  She rolled into a pool of light cast by a desultory torch bracketed above the wardrobe, and stopped.

     Her eyes adjusted to the gloom, and she saw him, truly saw him, for the first time.  She wanted to cram her frigid knuckles into her mouth and weep, fold herself over her knees and cry until she was hollow, but she didn't dare.  He eschewed pity, and he would interpret her tears and cries as just that-unwanted pity from an unwanted savior.  So she swallowed the howl of stunned outrage and shock that had risen in her throat and forced herself to look him in the eye.

     His robes were as neat and crisp as ever, and beneath the smell of allspice and parchment dust was the smell of lavender laundry soap.  The white collar of the linen shirt he wore beneath his robes was immaculate, the edges clean and sharp.  His boots gleamed in the wavering torchlight.  His face was an inscrutable mask, white as bleached bone.

     That, however, was where normality ended.  He looked…ravaged, for lack of a better word.  His face was haggard, the skin drawn tightly over his cheeks, and his eyes, for all their fire, were bleak and desolate.  She was sure that if she gazed into them long enough, she would see the great fortress of his indomitable will crumble, the foundation collapse upon itself in a mushroom cloud of bitter surrender.  And on the collar of his robes were two pinprick holes where his dignity had once rested.

     _What did they do to you?_ she wanted to shriek at him, and she fought the urge to plunge her hand into her pocket and crush the pin coiled there between her fingers.  She longed to draw it out and return it to its rightful place.  Though her rational mind knew it was ludicrous, heart was convinced that with that single deed, everything that had come after would be expunged, the cosmic clock reset and the cruel pendulum of Fate stayed before the killing arc.

     But things didn't work like that, not even here, where magic was law and strong as the desire of the soul that wielded it.  If they did, Headmaster Dumbledore would have waved it all away with a merry flick of his wand.  Harry would be alive and whole, and Professor Snape would still simmer with mesmerizing, wormwood vitality, not wear his robes like a shroud.  She wrapped her trembling hands around the armrests of her chair, bit her tongue until pain flared, bright and coppery in her mouth, and watched each breath billow from her nostrils in a fog of spent life while she waited for the silence to be broken.  

     "Are you cold?" he asked abruptly, and the bedsprings creaked as he shifted his weight.

     "Yes, sir," she said, and her body shivered, as if to prove the point.

     "Where are your cloak and gloves?" he murmured.  Then, an afterthought, "Stupid girl."

     She shrugged, and his shoulders stiffened in silent reproach.  "It's twenty degrees warmer on the seventh floor, sir.  I'm sorry."

     He snorted.  "Typical Gryffindor.  Willing to charge anywhere at all with no thought of preparation or consequences."  He tugged irritably on his own cloak and spared her a baleful, contemptuous glance.  "Bring me my boots," he snapped.  "And as I have no desire to have your self-inflicted death by hypothermia added to the list of charges brought against me, you may bring one of my traveling cloaks as well.  The ones on the left only-the ones on the right are for formal occasions and worth more than your mind-boggling life."

     "Sir?" she said blankly, uncertain that she had heard him correctly.

     "You heard me, Stanhope," he snapped, and this time there were traces of the old, familiar dangerous vitriol in his voice, much to her surreptitious glee.  "Bring the boots from my wardrobe and one of my traveling cloaks.  At once."

     She struggled to maintain a neutral expression while she pondered the fact that he had just offered her his clothes, clothes that would undoubtedly smell of allspice and parchment dust and wrap her in a cloud of temporary protection against the frigid, finger-stiffening cold and the demons with human faces that lurked outside these rooms.  She swallowed a bewildered giggle and reached for her control stick with pained, delirious precision.

     "Yes, sir," she said, and inclined her head in a curt, acquiescent nod.

     His wardrobe was as organized and precise as his classroom, and as she stared at the neatly partitioned row of cloaks, robes, shirts, and trousers, she could not suppress a surge of admiration.  No space was wasted.  The white linen shirts hung beside the utilitarian black robes, and the crisp trousers were arranged beside the flowing cloaks in a perfectly symmetrical line.  Not a thread was out of place.

     _Only thing I don't see are his underwear, _she thought absently as she reached for the cloak on the far left of the wardrobe.

     _Hoping to see them, were you? _muttered her grandfather coyly, and her cheeks prickled with embarrassed heat.

     _No, actually, I wasn't.  More familiarity than I want, thank you.  I don't need to see Professor's Snape's tighty whities._

_     Maybe he doesn't wear any, _the voice suggested with gleeful pragmatism.

     _That _was not a line of thought she needed to pursue at this date, or any date, for that matter, so she set it aside with an affronted snort and concentrated on coaxing the cloak she had chosen from its hanger.  The wardrobe was too tall for her to grasp the cloak from the top, so she tugged gently on the hem bunched between her cold fingers.  The hanger swayed drunkenly on the rod, but the cloak did not budge.  It simply hung there, stolid as a wall.

     "Dammit," she swore under her breath, and tightened her grip in preparation for a more vociferous tug.

     "Tear that cloak, Miss Stanhope, and I will deduct its value from the Gryffindor point glass at the earliest opportunity," Professor Snape purred, his voice as dark and sensual as the fabric between her fingers, and she shivered.  

     "Yes, sir."  

     She tugged again, harder this time, and though the thin copper hanger bowed at the insistent pressure, the cloak refused to yield its tenacious grip.  She let it go with an infuriated huff, and the hanger resumed its former shape with a merry, mocking twang.

     "Your incompetence is truly remarkable," he said matter-of-factly, and she heard the muffled groan of bedsprings as he rose, then the sharp clack of impatient boot heels on stone.  She did not need to turn to know that he was standing behind her.  She felt the predatory, invasive pressure of him between her shoulder blades and in the small of her narrow back.

     "It's a bit high, sir," she said, aware that if she leaned back, her head would graze his abdomen.  She could feel the heat of him through the fabric of his robes, and she swallowed with a dry click.

     "Spare me your excuses."  He sounded bored.  An alabaster hand shot out and plucked the cloak from its hanger with a ruthless, efficient snap of his wrist, and he dropped it onto her lap with thoughtless grace.  "Now, Miss Stanhope, my boots.  Preferably before I succumb to the infirmities of age."  The hand disappeared, but the unseen weight of him did not.

     "Yes, sir," she said, and folded the cloak so that the hem was tucked against her knees and in no danger of scraping the floor when she moved again.  Her hands, though cold and blue, were suddenly slick with sweat.

     She leaned down, each breath cold and sharp in her throat, and reached for the boots in the bottom of the wardrobe.  Her back gave a strident, warning twinge of protest, and she willed the cramped muscle to relax.  If she had an attack now, she would scream, and if she screamed, then Dawlish and Shacklebolt would burst through the door, find her in Professor Snape's bedroom, and waste no time in dragging him off on charges of torture and molestation of the disabled, never mind that they were both still clothed.  She pressed her lips together and breathed through her nose to cut off the groan of discomfort before it could form.

     _You're here, you're with Professor Snape, and you're both all right, _she told herself, and the cramp departed with a final, petulant twinge, a promise of darker things to come.

     She lifted the boots gingerly from the bottom of the wardrobe, her fingers digging into the soft felt lining inside to keep them from slipping.  The smell of old, well-cared for leather stung her nostrils, a rich, vinegary spice that made her eyes water.  She cradled them on her lap, surprised at their heft, and turned to face Professor Snape, who had never moved.

     He was standing, as she had expected, with his feet wide apart and his arms crossed in front of his chest, and he was looking down his nose at her with lazy malice.  She held out the boots without a word.

     He plucked them from her and rested them in the crook of one black-robed arm.  "At last.  Only took seven minutes.  Are you tired, Miss Stanhope?  You're breathing like a wounded Crumple-Horned Snorkack," he snapped.

     She panted and swiped the back of her hand across her forehead.  "A bit, but I'll be all right, sir."

     His lip curled in a savage sneer, and in the dim torchlight, she could see the glint of saliva on one crooked canine.  "Your endurance is appalling."

     She didn't know what to say to that, so she settled for the unpunishable "Yes, sir," and waited for him to elaborate.

     He spun away from her, stalked to a night table beside his bed, opened a drawer, and pulled out small, thin can.  Then he slammed the drawer with an irritated thump, strode to the foot of the bed, and sat down again.  "How do you expect to save me, stupid child, if you have the constitution of a cosseted houseplant?" he demanded sharply.  He was not looking at her now, but at the can in his hand, unscrewing the top of it with a languid twist of his fingers.

     Her brow furrowed in confusion.  "Sir?"

     He spared her a triumphant _there-you-see_ look as he set the now open can on the bed beside him and reached into his robes.  "You have always been an offense to the eyes, but your present state is nothing short of monstrous.  Your hair is filthy and brittle, your eyes are sunken pits inside your face, you look like a bundle of sticks inside your robes, and you're decidedly addled."  He pulled a chamois from his robes and dabbed it into the can.

     "Addled?" she repeated, a trace of petulance in her voice.

     He looked up sharply, the chamois poised over one of his boots.  "I did not stutter, Miss Stanhope," he said coldly.  "And I will not tolerate impudent whinging."  He stared at her in mute challenge for several moments, daring her to contradict him, and when she offered no further protest, he dropped his gaze to his boots again.  "What excuse could you possibly have for looking so wretched?"

     She sighed and harrowed her fingers through her hair.  "I've had trouble eating or sleeping lately, sir," she said quietly.          

     Ethereal lily fingers stopped their melancholy drift over supple leather, and he looked up at her.  "Is that supposed to inspire me to sympathy?" he murmured, and narrowed his eyes.

     She shook her head, once to the left, once to the right.  "No, sir."  She bit the inside of her cheek to smother the suicidal addendum, _I doubt anything in heaven or on Earth could make you remember what that feels like.  _

     He snorted, but his squinting eyes relaxed, and his hand resumed its hypnotic, rhythmic caress of the leather.  His lips pursed in a contemplative moue, as though he was pondering his arsenal of vitriol and deciding the choicest morsel, and then they relaxed again.

     "Whatever useless, inane histrionics you are engaging in, stop.  You are of little use to me as it is, but you will be worth nothing if you're prostrate in the Hospital Wing.  Contrary to the opinion of your severely over-inflated ego, you are not a saint, merely a student with a blatant disregard for rules, propriety, and sense, and as such, have no right to wage a ridiculous fast.  Your mind needs balanced nutrition to function properly, and judging from the deplorable condition of your hair, you are on the edge of collapse.  If you ever come before me again in such poor shape, I will turn you out, Headmaster or no.  Is that understood?"

     "Yes, sir."  She was torn between indignation and dumbfounded amusement.

     "Mm," he grunted.  His eyes drifted to the cloak still bundled on her lap and hardened.  "Why haven't you put that on?" he snapped.  

     She flinched at the acrimony, bitter as anise, in his voice.  Clearly, he had taken the cloak's continued presence on her lap as another sign of gross impertinence, not as the simple forgetfulness that it was.  "Sorry, Professor, I'd forgotten," she said, chagrined, and groped in the dim light for the clasp.

     His fluttering hands froze in mid-circle.  "I told you, Miss Stanhope," he spat, each word wrenched through gritted teeth, I am not your professor, and I never was."  

     Her own hands drooped into the fabric of the cloak in her lap, the fingers curled loosely around the tiny metal clasp at the neck.  She looked at him for nearly a minute without speaking, knowing that if she said what was straining at the fraying tether of her caution, he would bring the full brunt of his wrath upon her head.  He had proven that his tongue was just as cutting and potent as ever, as he had so admirably demonstrated in the parlor, and irritated as she was by his caustic petulance, she was not certain she wanted to risk an unchecked fullisade, not the least because he was right.  Officially, he _wasn't_ her professor, and he could do as he pleased, say as he pleased without fear of reprisal.  These walls were deaf, dumb, and blind, and whatever came to pass here would stay here.

     She was face to face with the tiger now, and there was no safety line to pull her away from crushing jaws.

     In the end, she said it.  Against her better judgment and the voice of self-preservation that wailed piteously inside her head, she let the tether snap, because to not let it snap was tantamount to admitting that she was of no consequence, that she meant nothing, that everything his unfaltering cruelty had taught her was irrelevant, an unintended side effect, and that possibility was too painful to entertain.  She could not bear to relinquish the tattered belief that a grudging respect had blossomed between them.  So, she walked to the crumbling precipice of safety, peered over the edge into the abyssal maw of unknown consequences foretold, and stepped off.

     "Begging your pardon, sir, but that is not for you to decide."  She bowed her head and waited for the inevitable.

     _Please, Jesus, let me make it out alive_, she thought, and her heart thudded painfully against her ribcage.__

     A silence so complete she thought she had gone deaf fell over the room.  Even the ragged, stricken hiss of her own petrified breath was muted, and she wondered for a moment if the hand of God had reached down and stuffed swatches of gauze into her ears.  On the periphery of her vision, she saw Professor Snape staring at the crown of her head, his left cheek hollowed, as though he were biting it to stifle an acid retort.  The hand holding the chamois hovered above one half-polished boot, and the fingertips were smeared with the faintest traces of bootblack.  Ivory and oil.

     She waited for the volley of livid, scathing insults, each as beautiful as a nightshade lily, to fly from his lips, which, in the extremity of his disbelief, had disappeared into his face, but it never materialized.  He simply put the chamois down on the bed, set the boots on the floor beside his feet, and rose in a swirl of doomsday black.

     _I've pushed him too far, _she thought with stark, swooning horror.  _He's going to hit me._

     That was all she had time to think before he was upon her.  She recoiled from the expected blow, but his hand did not come up to strike her face; rather, it reached down, seized the cloak folded haphazardly on her lap, and snapped it open with the strident crack of starched wool.  "I told you to put this on," he snarled.  "Lean forward.  Now."

     She was so relieved to be in possession of all of her limbs and her flagging spirits that she floated forward bonelessly, limp and uncontrolled as a rag doll.  Her robes were plastered to her back by drying sweat.  Only instinct prevented her from resting her head against the shelf of his groin, an act that would no doubt precipitate another, more lethal verbal assault.  Her nose was a hair's breadth from the voluminous folds of his robes, and before she could stop herself, she inhaled deeply.

     Warmth enveloped her, and she was swaddled in the comforting itch of wool.  His voice cut through her blissful stupor like a serrated blade.  

     "Stop indulging in your profoundly disturbing predilection for my robes and sit up," he hissed.

     "Yes, sir."  She sat up, grateful that the chagrined flush of her cheeks was concealed by abetting shadow.

     He pressed his fingers beneath her chin and tilted it up with a brusque jerk, and she winced as a muscle in her nape gave a disapproving twinge.

     "Stop whinging," he muttered, and fastened the clasp at her throat.

     "Yes, sir," she squawked.  She decided not to tell him that he had buttoned it a trifle too tightly, for fear that he would rue his mild response to her earlier audacity and take upon himself to tighten it still further and rid himself of her onerous persistence.  She waited until his back was turned and wedged a finger between the fabric and her neck in attempt to loosen its grip on her windpipe.

     "Sir," she began when he had settled himself on the bed again and picked up his boots.

     "Silence!  I have had enough of your incessant palavering for the time being."

     She knew better than to press her unbelievable luck, so she lapsed into a respectful silence and watched him work.  The motion of his hand was slow and constant, and the sound of the chamois on the supple leather reminded her of the sound her grandfather's brush had made as he scrubbed the knobbled pine boards of the kitchen floor, a soft, scouring _shushshushshush_ that spoke of cleanliness and care.  The combination of warmth from the cloak and the familiar noise of his polishing was soporific, and she wilted in her chair, her eyelids pleasantly heavy.  

     _Shushshushshush,_ she thought drowsily, and wallowed in the scent of allspice that wafted from the cloak in a dry, seductive cloud.  _Wonder if he knows how relaxed he looks now?  Probably not.  Wouldn't let me see if he did.  _The thoughts were hazy and unimportant, and she let them drift through the scrutinizing filter of her mind like tendrils of dissipating mist.

     He did look relaxed, though, almost serene.  The deep lines of worry etched into the corners of his mouth and creeping stealthily from the corners of his eyes were not so profound.  It was as though he was smoothing away years of toil and trouble with every stroke of the chamois in his hand.  His lips had reappeared, and they were parted just enough to give her a glimpse of tooth.  And she thought, lolling gormlessly in her chair, that was how he must have looked as a young man, before life had crushed him beneath a mountain of seething hatreds and bitter disappointments.  It made her want to cry, and so she retreated into the smell of allspice and parchment dust and warm wool and closed her stinging eyes.

     "Dribble on that cloak, and you'll spend the remainder of your time here washing it without magic in the lavatory," he muttered, not looking up from his boots.

     "Erm, yes, sir," she said quietly, and straightened in her chair.  The cloak was too long for her, and as she scooted her buttocks into a more comfortable position in the seat, the excess fabric, which had heretofore rested in an undignified bunch in the small of her back, caught on her shifting shanks and tightened the noose around her neck.  She sputtered and dug her finger into the collar again.  "Sir?" she ventured to make up for her breach of decorum.  "What can you tell me about cyanide?  I don't recall seeing it in any of the fifth-year Potions work."

     She immediately wished she had held her tongue.  His hand still moved across the boot in wide, dreamy circles, but all the years he had left behind descended upon him again, blighting his face and stealing the miraculous, youthful radiance that had temporarily suffused it.  His lip twitched in a sardonic sneer.

     "Cyanide is for use in N.E.W.T-level Potions work only, and then only sparingly because I cannot trust you frothing twits not to poison yourselves."  His hand paused in its meticulous circuit of the boot.  "As Mr. Potter so admirably demonstrates."  He scoffed and renewed his attention to the boot.

     "Is it used in any common magical products-cleaning products, maybe, or pesticides?"

     His hand slowed again as he considered the question, and she could see the cogs and wheels turning in his head.  "There may be.  Pesticides are the province of Hagrid and Professor Sprout.  As far as the cleaning supplies go, Filch, much as he loathes the populace of this school, would never use anything that might endanger the feckless student body.  More's the pity," he finished drily, and reached for the other boot.

     "Do you think it's possible that Harry accidentally poisoned himself in Herbology?"

     He shook his head.  "Cyanide acts too quickly.  He couldn't have ingested it anywhere besides the Potions classroom."  He finished polishing the toe with an ill-tempered jerk of his now unrecognizable chamois.  "Even if it were possible, it would not account for the missing cyanide from my stores."

     So much for that theory.  She tried another tack.  "Maybe someone poisoned him using cyanide from another source and stole the cyanide from your stores to make you look guilty," she suggested.

     He stared at her in exasperation.  "And where, pray tell, would they get it?  Cyanide is a controlled substance, and no apothecary with a shred of common sense would sell it to anyone under the age of reason; most will only sell it to licensed Potions Masters."  He straightened as he spoke, and she did not miss the note of pride that had crept into his voice as he imparted this last bit of information.

     "Maybe they stole it from Professor Sprout's stores.  How meticulous is her record-keeping?"

     He was silent for a long moment, and then he said, "I don't know, but I have never had reason to doubt her skills as a responsible, prudent Herbologist."  His voice was listless and drained, and by the protective hunch of his shoulders, she surmised that he did not want to talk about it anymore.  "Her skills as a teacher are another matter entirely," he added wearily.  "I'm certain the Ministry has examined her stores, as well as the stores of the rest of the staff."

     _Yes, but how thoroughly?  Not much reason to look at her if they've already decided on a culprit, is there? _she thought, but she said, "I imagine they had their hands full with Professor Moody, sir."

     "Your wit is not appreciated, Miss Stanhope," he muttered, but there was no venom in it.  Then, just within the range of her hearing, "Lucky to have all their bits intact when they left, I'd wager."

     It suddenly dawned on her cautious, overwhelmed mind that the latter sotto voce comment was his singular brand of vituperative humor, and only the certainty that he would flay her alive with his barbed tongue if so much as a titter passed her lips kept her from braying laughter.  She dug her nails into the palms of her hands to distract herself from the treacherous, feather-quill tickle of mirth in the back of her throat.

     "Sir," she said, concentrating very hard on the mesmerizing motion of his hand, "Does cyanide have uses in any Muggle gadgetry that would blend in at Hogwarts?"

     "Investigating Muggle technology is a waste of time, Miss Stanhope, and of late, time has become a most precious commodity where I am concerned.  I'll not have you waste it chasing after every crackpot theory that enters your febrile mind," he snapped, and set the crumpled chamois on the bed with a furious snap of his wrist.  "Merlin's beard."

     "Just investigating all possible avenues, sir.  Don't you ever watch Mugg-no, I don't suppose you do," she muttered.  There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, and then she said, "How does the ward on the cabinet work?"

     He fixed her with an incredulous, impatient stare.  "Has it not occurred to you, you impossibly tiresome child, that I do not wish to discuss this anymore?" he said, and one hand came up to massage his forehead between his fingers and thumb.

     She knew how he felt.  Her own head throbbed like an impacted tooth, heavy and unwieldy on the thin, straining stem of her neck.  She wanted nothing more than to let it sag to her chest and succumb to the exhaustion that filled her bones like hardened mercury, but the need for answers, for some shred of  enlightenment, overrode the pang of empathy in the pit of her stomach, and she straightened her knotted shoulders and stiffened her spine.

     "Yes, sir, I know.  As you have so often pointed out, I see far too much for my own good.  However, as you so succinctly put it, you have no time for such luxuries as self-indulgence," she said flatly, and her face was a mask of bloodless, clinical detachment.  Her knees and stomach were hot putty beneath her skin, and for once in her life, she was grateful for the hard seat biting into her buttocks.  Without it, she would have sunk to the floor in shock at her own audacity.

     _Way to go, Rebecca; you've just sewn your own burial shroud,_ gibbered the voice of outraged prudence inside her head, and looking at Professor Snape's blanched, pinched face, she could not disagree.  Her mutinous stomach beat a hasty retreat to the safe harbor of her ankles, and she was sure that it had abandoned her dinner in its wake.  That was churning and seesawing in the vertiginous void, no doubt biding its uneasy time until it could make a spectacular reappearance in the lavatory toilet later in the evening.

     His eyes were flat, black milk glass, the lifeless eyes of an encroaching serpent, and it took every ounce of her will not to flinch.  She curled her fingers around the armrests of her chair, and the cracked vinyl creaked as her fingers dug convulsively into the grooves that split it like age lines in a careworn face.  

     _Say something,_ she thought feverishly, and her tongue was numb and bitter inside her mouth.

     "I will make you pay for every liberty you take here," he said softly, malice dripping from every word like suppurating pus.

     "I know, sir," she said, and covered her face with her hands.

     _Oh, Lord do I know it.  And part of me prays for it because if you do, it means that I've done my job, I've run the good race._

  She heard the furtive rustle of linen and wool as he shifted on the bed again, and for one panicked instant, she thought he was getting up to strike her, but then she dismissed the idea as too boorish.  He would be far crueler, subtler in his vengeance.  Besides, she was too tired to care.  She had limited energy, and she could not afford to squander it squabbling with him.

     "The wards," he said stiffly, "as all wards are, are linked to the caster.  In essence, they draw their efficacy from me, from my biological rhythms.  As each ward is bound to the caster, it bears a unique signature breakable only by the caster and well-trained Aurors.  No one but myself should have been able to gain access to the stores."

     She drew her index fingers over the hairs of her opposite forearm.  "What happens if someone tries to breach the ward, sir?"

     "They receive a shock that temporarily stuns them, and the disruption causes a corresponding jolt in the system of the caster, a jolt both exquisitely painful and unmistakable."

      An unpleasant thought occurred to her then, and she swallowed against a wave of nausea.  "Does that mean, sir, that when the Aurors broke your ward…," she trailed off.  She didn't really want to know.

     "Yes."  A Curse as dark as unconfessed sin.

     "Oh."  That was all she could manage.  "I suppose it would be ridiculous to ask if you felt any such jolt before Potter keeled over," she said weakly.

     "Yes, it would," he snapped.

     Before she could think of anything else to say, the door opened with a low, ominous click of turning tumbler, and her head snapped in the direction of the sound, her heart mortified thunder against her ribs.

     _Caught!  Caught! _she thought frantically as she swung her chair to face the door.  _Oh, sweet Jesus, I'm caught, and they're going to torture him for it.  _A strangled, helpless wheeze escaped her, and she cast a trapped, bug-eyed gaze at Professor Snape, who was gazing at the opening door with no discernible expression.  Indeed, he was eerily calm, almost disdainful as the door swung inexorably inward.

     _Get a grip, girl, _roared her grandfather, a roundhouse slap over the rising din of panic.  _It'll make things worse for him if you _look _guilty._  _Cool and steady now, just like with those lackwit psychiatrists back at the cripple ranch.  _

     She snorted and plunged her hand into the pocket of her robes in search of her wand.  If it became evident that they were going to haul the two of them away, then she would at least have the satisfaction of committing an offense worthy of the indignity.  The panic receded and left only cold glee in its stead.

     "No, you stupid girl!" hissed Professor Snape.  "Do you want to end up in Azkaban?"

     The contemptuous urgency in his voice drew her attention from the door, and she stared at him in abject consternation.  "Sir?"

     He swore softly and muttered, "Blasted Gryffindor vainglory.  Shoot first and think later."

     "That would explain why so many become Aurors," said a laconic voice from the doorway, and Rebecca jerked her head toward it so quickly that the tendons in her neck gave a violent twinge of protest.

     It was an Auror, all right, the one called Shacklebolt, if she recalled correctly, and he was eyeing her with a mixture of wry amusement and diffuse concern.  She opened her mouth to offer an explanation for her presence, then shut it again.  There was no reasonable scenario she _could_ offer, truth be told, and what was more, she didn't want to give him one.  She did, however, long to deliver an agonizing curse directly between his eyes.  

     The doors of her fortress clanged shut with a rolling echo, and the blissful, clarifying numbness settled over her, sharpening her vision and soothing her tumultuous mind.  Everything slowed.  The hummingbird flutter of her heart slowed to a languid, drowsy thud, and all concern melted away, fog in the face of scorching sun.  It was a relief to feel absolutely nothing after weeks of turmoil, and she sank into the embrace of emotional inertia with a grateful sigh.

     _I've been away too long, and it's good to be home._  A sardonic smile ghosted over her lips.

     The Auror must have sensed the sudden shift, because he raised his hands in a placatory gesture.  "I mean no harm, Miss…Stanhope?" he said.  "I'm just here to see that you're safely out of here before I go off duty.  My colleagues won't take kindly to you being here."  

     "Are you?"  Her voice was an uninflected monotone, and from the corner of her eye, she could see Professor Snape gazing at her with piercing scrutiny.

     Another fleeting smirk.  So he had not descended into unassailable apathy, after all. _Good to see you again, sir._

     "Indeed I am," Shacklebolt said implacably, his hands clasped behind his back.  "Hiding in plain sight is a rather tricky business, and Headmaster Dumbledore asked me to help where I could.  If you would come with me, I'll Disillusion you again."  He offered her a polite smile.

     "No.  I don't think I will."  Cold and dead as stagnant water.

     She had no intention of allowing him to touch her with his wand.  For all she knew, he was going to Stun her and summon his colleagues to behold the incontrovertible evidence of Snapian machinations.  Granted, if that was his purpose, there was nothing to stop him from carrying it out, but at least she wouldn't lumber blindly into the trap like a mindless sheep.  She tightened her fingers, which had never left her pocket, around the shaft of her wand and stared stonily back at him.

     She wanted to hex him, hurl curses like sweet epithets, one after the other, until he and his blue robes were a disheveled heap on the floor.  Her tongue prickled and burned with the taste of rebellion, sour as aged whiskey, and her hand caressed the smooth wood of her wand in an eager, sensuous rhythm.  Just two words, or four, and she could realize her dream of seeing an Auror writhing on the floor, and that was one dream she would see fulfilled, whatever the cost.

     From his seat on the foot of his bed, Snape watched the confrontation between Kingsley and his young changeling with avid fascination.  From the befuddled expression on Shacklebolt's face, he had clearly not anticipated such ferocious resistance, and Snape could not suppress a stab of truculent glee at his bewilderment.  Finally, something for which his extensive Ministry training had not prepared him-a stubborn, iron-spined pupil and uneasy ally who wasn't going to blithely accept edicts given force merely because of crisp blue robes and an air of entitled confidence.  It would have been funny if it weren't so dangerous.

     It _was _dangerous, about that there was no mistake.  Something had happened in the five seconds between the click of the tumbler and the opening of the door, a cataclysmic shifting of the winds that mesmerized and unnerved him.  Gone was the stricken, goggle-eyed child who had swung to face the door, and in her place was a misshapen, white golem with polished mica eyes, cunning as a fox and quivering with the unsatiated need to inflict hurt.  She had erased all emotion from her face and posture as quickly and efficiently as if she had drawn a curtain, but he could still feel the enmity radiating from her in palpable waves, making his too-long idle fingers ache with tension and filling his sensitive nose with a pungent, primal reek.

     She wanted to hurt Kingsley, _longed_ for it.  She was young, and too tired and too frightened and furious to make the distinction between ally and enemy.  The blue robe was enough to damn Shacklebolt, to earn him a painful scorch mark or two before his steadier hand and vaster knowledge brought things to their inevitable conclusion.  One more word or a sudden move from the Auror, and she would forget restraint and release her anger in a hail of red and yellow.

     Well did he understand that desire, that feral, all-consuming ache to damage, destroy, and wreak vengeance upon the world around you; he had, after all, spent seven years in the corrosive red and gold shadow of Potter and his sycophants, choking on his impotent rage and stroking it away with swift, clandestine caresses beneath the cover of night.  That rage had swallowed him up with dulcet promises of seeing his enemies broken before him, sniveling and helpless, as he had once been, and it had taken him by the hand and led him down the path to Voldemort's inner circle.  

     Which was why he could not let her do it, sorely as he was tempted to do just that.  Voldemort would never recruit her, but he was not the only source of evil and depravity in the world, much as the rest of the wizarding world liked to console itself otherwise.  When Voldemort was toppled, either by Potter or the treacherous wand of a former servant, another tyrant would rise to take his place, one only too happy to prey upon the unending wellspring of hatred that flowed through her veins and lent her a warped vitality.  They would not be concerned with her grotesque frame, only with what her indomitable, daunting will could accomplish, and he had learned from their short, reluctant acquaintance that she could achieve more than enough to ensure calamity.

     Kingsley was opening his mouth again, and if he uttered a syllable before Rebecca was brought to heel, there would be no stopping her, and that would not bode well for anyone involved, because if she cast a spell, it would not be a half-hearted attempt; it would be the most powerful spell at her disposal, and Kingsley, indoctrinated as he was by all the airy claptrap about fairness and the mighty showing mercy to the weak, would not retaliate until the damage was done.  Woe be unto him if she chose a spell that incapacitated the victim on the first shot.

     "Stanhope," he spat, his voice sharp as a whip crack in the pregnant stillness.  "I have already told you to stop this foolish grandstanding.  Do not make me ask you again."

     Under normal circumstances, she would have jumped and bowed her head in immediate acquiescence, but she neither jumped nor lowered her head.  Her nostrils flared, and the fabric of her robes rippled as she clutched her wand more tightly still.  Her eyes remained fixed on Kingsley, who, it appeared, was finally beginning to grasp the gravity of the situation.

     "Sir?" she said in the same flat, colorless voice she had used to tell Kingsley that she would not be complying with his wishes.

     "Let go of your wand.  He is not going to harm you; he is one of the Headmaster's faithful minions," he muttered drily.

     "I don't trust him, sir," she responded.

     I am not asking you to trust him, Miss Stanhope," he snarled, irritated at her obdurate refusal to stand down.  "I am asking you to trust _me_, and if you cannot do so, then perhaps I and the Headmaster have misjudged you.  Severely."

     She did look at him then, and he saw with no surprise whatsoever that the doors of her impregnable fortress had slammed shut.  Her face was reduced to the sum of its organic parts-wan strips of flesh over bone and stringy sinew, gelatinous bits of tissue with blue irises stuffed into bony sockets.  The entity known as Rebecca Stanhope, bane of sanity and peace of mind, had retreated behind the ramparts, divested itself of bothersome quibbles of right and wrong, and devoted itself to the simple yet infinitely terrible act of self-preservation.  In other words, Kingsley Shacklebolt was a very lucky man.

     "Cooperate, now and in future.  I'll not be the excuse for appalling Gryffindor histrionics."  He smoothed a stray forelock of hair from his forehead and fixed her with a withering glare, which, he noted with dour unease, she weathered with startling equanimity.

     "Yes, sir."  She withdrew her hand from her pocket.

     "Come here," Kingsley told her, and she went, a mistrustful cur being pulled on a throttling chain, her face a determined blank.

     "Miss Stanhope?" Snape called.  "Turn over your wand.  We wouldn't want any mishaps in the corridors."

     She stiffened, a growl of protest just behind her lips.

     "Liberties, Miss Stanhope," he murmured, and she thrust her wand at Kingsley with a jerky lunge of her matchstick arm.

     "Thank you," Kingsley said to her, and she returned his courtesy with an ill-tempered grunt.  Then he turned to him and said, "Thank you, Professor."

     _You have no idea just how much you should be thankful for, _he thought with sardonic relish, but he said nothing.

     Kingsley was just about to perform the Disillusionment Charm again when he, Snape, realized that Rebecca was still wearing his cloak.  "Wait," he ordered abruptly, and rose from the bed with an unconscious flourish of his robes.  "My cloak, Miss Stanhope."

     Some of the stoic bleakness receded from her eyes, and she blinked at him in logy surprise.  "Oh," she said, "yes, sir."  Her fingers drifted up and began to grapple indelicately with the clasp at her throat.

     "Give it to me before you tear it with your bumbling," he muttered.  

     He strode to where she sat, and plucked the clasp loose with practiced ease.  He gathered the cloak in his hands, dimly aware that the entrenched scent of his work and sweat was now overlain with the light odor of peaches.  Disconcerted by how unexpectedly pleasant he found the combination, he held it away from him, as though he thought it contaminated.

     In the instant before Kingsley tapped the top of her head with the tip of his wand, something flickered behind the closely guarded walls of her eyes, but before he could make sense of it, she was consumed by a wavering cocoon of nothing, as though the empty space of the room had reached out and devoured her whole.  A moment after that, she was gone, truly gone, and he was alone in his room with the sound of a closing door ringing in his ears and a cloak in his hands that no longer smelled singularly his own.

     "Miserable chit," he muttered disagreeably, but there was no malice in it.  He put the cloak over the chair beside his bed, and when he went to sleep that night, there were no dreams.


	42. In Places Uninvited

Chapter Forty-Two

     At half-past six on Sunday morning, Rebecca found herself and a bleary-eyed, tousle-haired Neville in the owlery.  Neville was still in his woolen nightclothes, and Trevor the toad hunkered cozily in one trouser pocket.  The owls, disgruntled by such an early morning intrusion, filled the frigid morning air with indignant hoots, beak-clicking, and the dusty, rustling flap of wings.  Feathers floated from the rafters and carpeted the litter of bones, tiny, desiccated corpses, and ancient, moldering droppings.

     "What're we doin' hur?" Neville muttered, his voice still fuzzy with sleep, and he swiped the back of his hand over his slumber-swollen eyes.

     "I needed privacy, and once this is done, I'll need to send it off as quickly as possible."  She flapped a blank piece of parchment at him as she settled herself into the remotest corner with a snort of icy breath.  

     "Privacy?" he repeated, interest seeping in to dispel the phlegmatic thickness of his voice, and he blinked owlishly at her.

     "That's what I said," she answered tersely, but a bemused grin danced briefly across her face.  "Can't exactly go writing seditious letters in full view of the governmental authorities, now, can I?"  She rummaged in the pocket of her robes for her Dicta-Quill.

     "No, I suppose not," he said at length, and ambled over and crouched beside her, haunches hovering like an eclipsing sun over a dune of crumbling mouse bones.  Trevor gave an indolent croak from the pocket of his trousers.  "Why do you need me with you to write a letter?"  No bitterness or condescending amusement, only honest curiosity.

     Her amusement faded, and her face hardened.  "Because what I'm about to do can be some bad juju," she said bluntly.

     He shifted uneasily on his haunches, and the carpet of bones beneath his feet crackled and popped in a sympathetic susurration of trepidation.  "What do you mean?" he asked, and when she turned to meet his gaze, she saw that all traces of lethargy had been supplanted by blossoming fear.

     _You don't really want to know._

     She smoothed the piece of parchment over her knees with cold efficiency as she spoke.  "When I was at D.A.I.M.S, we had a game, a ritual.  We called it the Story.  Not everyone played it; it was secret, something the nurses and the doctors and the shrinks couldn't regulate, and we liked it that way.  We protected it.  It was _ours_, the Storytellers'."  She tapped the point of her quill against the parchment.

     "The Storytellers?"  He surrendered the losing battle with gravity and plopped beside her with a fleeting moue of distaste at the sound of crunching bone.

     She nodded, and a smile that did not reach her eyes spread across her face, predatory and humorless as death.  "That's what we called ourselves, the nine of us.  The Storytellers."

     "Why?"

     She spared him a pained, sidelong glance.  "Because that's what we did.  We told the Story, or rather, the Story let itself be told.  We lost control of it once it started.  We were the instruments for the Story, but we didn't make it, if that makes sense.  We were just the conduits.  It used us.  And we liked it."

     "I don't understand," he said, and though he was too polite to say so, he clearly thought she had left the land of rationality behind by several turns.  His eyes were locked onto her face, earnestly searching for signs of fatigue or impending insanity.

     "I know you don't," she said, and it was true.  She had not expected him to understand any of this.  No one could, save those who had lived it, those who had helped feed it.

     "Do you take Magical Theory or Arithmancy?" she asked.  She had never seen him in any of her lessons, but it couldn't hurt to ask.  Perhaps he had received home tutelage.  If his grandmother was as ambitious as he claimed, it was entirely possible she had tried to cram the onerous and esoteric subject down his browbeaten throat.

     He scoffed.  "Never.  Smart enough to know I'm too thick for it.  Besides, it's dry and dead.  I like getting my hands into things, feeling them, _seeing _them.  Maybe that's why I like Herbology-I can see the plant grow.  That stuff is all theory, and you never get to see evidence of it."

     Behind the neutral, courteous façade of her face, she boggled at his stupidity.  Arithmancy, dry and dead?  Fool.  He saw no further than his eyes, then.  Yes, it was numbers and theorems and formulae, tedious minutiae, most of it, but it was the key to the vibrant, pulsing life that thrummed beneath his feet and coaxed the green things from the soil.  It was the cornerstone, the nucleus of the magic that coursed through his veins and dripped from each wall and parapet of the castle in an almost visible mist.  Arithmancy harnessed raw magic to bring forth usable spells from the void, and in the most deft of hands, it could show every possibility of every event in a person's life.  He who controlled Arithmancy, who could roll dem bones, controlled the world.

     She said none of this to him, however.  If he could not sense it after being bombarded by the magic of the castle for the past five years, then no amount of lecturing would change that.  She didn't understand how he couldn't comprehend it, quite frankly.  The unadorned truth of it throbbed in the small of her back like a constant cramp.  The raw, untapped power of this place was staggering, terrifying and heady, and yet he never noticed the sleeping monolith that dreamt beneath his feet.  It was incomprehensible.

     "Magical theory or not, you know that for every ounce of magic that wizards are able to refine and control, there are four they can't," she said, and stretched her stiff legs until they shuddered with the tingling warmth of increased blood flow.  "Some theoreticians think that magic is a fundamental part of the earth, a fifth element comprised of the other four.  Magic derives it power from earth, wind, water, and fire and can be used to control any of those elements in turn.  Spells, to put it bluntly."

     "The most widely accepted theory goes that magic, since it is a conglomeration of the four most primal and unpredictable forces in the universe, must be inherently volatile as well.  That's why only certain people can practice magic.  They're sensitive and sturdy enough to channel it through their bodies without damage to themselves.  Those who are too dull or too delicate never know it's there and are Muggles."

     "You read all of this?" asked Neville incredulously.

     She shrugged.  "Read it, heard it in lecture.  Reading about magic is one of the few things of which D.A.I.M.S. approved.  I suppose they thought that if we didn't read about it, we'd do something dangerous, like experiment, but they forgot.  They got arrogant."  She lapsed into thoughtful silence.

     "Forgot what?"  He scuffed the toe of one trainer through the mantle of dust that lay over the bones like a gritty shroud.

     "That for every ounce of magic wizardkind has tamed, four more elude their grasp.  And we found the motherlode in that damned basement."  She tittered, a mirthless sound, dry cornhusks in an arid, scorching breeze.

     D.A.I.M.S., for being a school of witchcraft and wizardry, was one of the most magically sterile places she'd ever been in.  They smothered it, papered it over with machines and plaster and miles of linoleum and tile.  The walls rebuffed magic rather than absorbing it.  It wasn't like Hogwarts, where every stone bled magic; it was dead, a corpse rotting from the inside out.

     But that basement-that basement was something else entirely, a pocket of magic that they couldn't throttle, no matter how thick the fire doors.  It _hurt_ to go in there sometimes because the magic was so thick.  It made your teeth vibrate, tingle like they did when you drew too near a power line, and some of them left with blood drying under their noses and the taste of metal shavings in their mouths.  They always went, though; they had to because that was where they told the Story.

     It was alive, ravenously alive, sentient, or so she had always suspected.  To this day, she wasn't sure if it drew its magic from the generations of Storytellers that had woven their elemental magic there, or if it had, in fact, served as the touchtone for what they had done there, a deep, black reservoir from which they had drawn their strength.  Neither possibility appealed to her, and the truth was, she didn't really want to know.  Some things were better left undisturbed.  

     Back then, they hadn't worried about such things.  They were children playing a game, a game that passed the time and thumbed their collective nose at the draconian authority figures that regimented their lives with latex-covered fists.  It was fun and harmless and helped them cope with the hopeless monotony of bed checks, showers, high colonics, and inspections of their daily bowel output.  It was also a secret, and because they were permitted so few of those, they clung to it with tenacious, jealous fingers.

     There had been nine of them, never more and never less, and every Friday, after the midnight bed check, they filed to the basement in a soundless, somnolent line, wraiths in pursuit of illicit deeds.  All of them rollers of the bones and readers of the runes, and all of them eager for the swell of magic that was so akin to more carnal pleasures.  Past the traitorous, dim lights of the medicinal hallways, around the silhouetted phantoms of the uncomfortable, stringently utilitarian furniture, wheels and crutch tips and pneumatic legs complicit in their utter lack of noise.  Down the narrow, rotting, wooden steps, offering their frail bodies to the mercurial, gaping maw of the basement.

     It stank of mildew and damp rot, and the bric-a-brac of one hundred and fifty years was strewn over the pocked cement floor-warped parallel bars, half-deflated therapy balls, moldering mats, even a rusted pair of iron legs braces, harbingers of crueler, more medieval days.  They made tracks and divots in the dust as they maneuvered their unwieldy steel and titanium bodies into a loose circle and crunched the brittle carapaces of cockroaches and beetles under foot and tread. 

     And in that circle, fingertip to fingertip, they wove the magic that took them away from the pain and the indignity and into a world where they walked on sturdy, springbok legs and breathed through lungs unscarred by cystic fibrosis.  The mildewed walls and gritty floors fell away, usurped by rolling meadows green as fantasy emeralds, sweltering jungles, frigid tundras, and roiling, windswept seas.  Phantom feet left footprints in lands of invention, and, with one collective wish, one joint _push_, they could fly and leave the world behind.

     This magic had no formal name and only one tool.  Words.  Human speech was the cloth from which these worlds had been crafted.  Stitch by stitch, syllable by syllable, they gave form to the void and lost themselves in it.  They were carried away on the voice of the chosen Storyteller for that night, and with every word he spoke, the magic grew stronger, more virulent.  Soon, what had started as a child's pastime became addiction, and eventually, before the Story was told for the last time and the basement shunned as a tainted place, it had become a curse.

     _Listen, my children, and you shall hear a tale of woe and untold fear._  That was the way it had always started, an invocation as old as rime, an invitation to come and watch the magic whorl and spin around them all, close as a shroud, and they had gone eagerly.  In the blind hours before dawn and the four a.m. bed check, they battled ogres and trolls, slew hordes of enemy soldiers, and felled untold monstrosities of the sea.  Their imaginary blades had been slick with blood, and they had reveled in the righteous bloodletting.

     Maybe things would have remained unchanged had they never decided to assign names to the breathing blade fodder that was their enemies, but someone-Jerold Hawkins, likely-had, on a whim, labeled one of the characters in the ongoing tale of knight-errantry The Weakling.  The moment the words had left his mouth, everyone knew to whom he was referring, and the grim, sallow, pimpled visage of Judith Pruitt had emblazoned itself on the retina of their collective eye.

     She had suspected then that they should have stopped, should have roused themselves from the ecstatic thrall of the Story's magic, but the lure was too strong, and the dark and gibbering imp of her bitter subconscious had wanted to see just how far the Story could be pushed, so she had ignored the panicked, warning lurch in the pit of her stomach, closed her eyes to shut out Jackson Decklan's pinched, ashen face, and let the threads of the Story twine themselves around her pounding heart.

     Dirt between her toes, soft and wet, pleasantly cool.  Though years had elapsed since that terrible night when everything spiraled out of control, that she still remembered with perfect clarity.  On the last night the Story was told, she was running with cool, loamy earth between her toes.  Running because-

     "We did something we shouldn't have, played a game we had neither the knowledge nor the skill to play, and it nearly caught us in the end.  Only dumb luck and brass got us out, and we never played again," she said brusquely, forcing her mind away from skeletons best left undisturbed if it could be helped.

     "What's that got to do with your letter?' he asked.

     "Because I think, Neville, dear, that it's time to play again," she said, her voice leaden and ineffably weary.

     He goggled at her in undisguised stupefaction.  "But why?  If it's as dangerous as you make it out to be, why would you want to?"  His pudgy face was taut with worry.

     "Want to?  I don't want to.  If I had my druthers, I'd have the memory of it burned from my mind.  Curious as I am, I'm certain that was the one secret I _never_ should have learned.  Curiosity killed the cat, and no satisfaction can bring him back," she crooned in a wry singsong.

     "Then why-,"

     "Because I have no other choice.  I'm not Harry Potter, Super Wizard, Boy of a Thousand Gifts.  I have no Invisibility Cloak to conceal me, and some of the things I have to do are unpardonable sins in the Church of Gryffindor, even the Church of Me, come to think of it, and if I have to sell myself, then I might as well take it as far and as deep as it goes."  She scrubbed her face with her hands.

     "Is it Dark magic?"  He shifted on the small hillock of bones, as though he were trying to put a few precious inches of life-saving space between them in case she said yes.

     "There is no Dark magic, no Light magic.  Magic just is.  It's how we use it that makes it good or evil.  Even a Summoning Charm could be used for evil."  She stifled a yawn.

     "If you say so.  Sounds like Dark wizard philosophy to me."  There was no accusation, only honest bewilderment.

     "The greatest trick of any despot or villain is to tell just enough of the truth to be dangerous."  She flexed her fingers and winced as the knuckles cracked like fractured ice.  "Look, Neville, you don't have to do this.  You can call me crazy as a loon and leave, and I'll think no less of you.  Honestly, if I were in your shoes, that's precisely what I would do.  This whole idea is absolutely mad, but it's the only one I've got."

     She meant every word she said.  She wouldn't begrudge him if he turned tail and fled to the safe, warm, rational world of the Gryffindor Common Room.  She wanted to do the same thing herself.  The warning claxons of prudence and self-preservation were loud and shrill inside her head, had been since she had awakened at half-past four with the idea coalescing in her sleep-fogged mind.  Even then, she had told herself that it was suicide, but she had barged into the fifth-year boys' dormitory and dragged him out of bed anyway, pretending not to notice Harry's empty bed and Ron Weasley's equally vacant eyes as he stared out the iced tower windows.

     Even so, she hoped he wouldn't choose the safer road.  If he did, she would not leave the owlery, not alive, at any rate.  They would bring her frozen, stiffening body out on a covered bier, a starched linen sheet covering her bulging, glazed eyes and the screaming, grinning rictus of her blue-lipped mouth.  An attentive bearer might notice the deep crescents gouged into the flesh of her palms, might note that her fingernails had been torn to the quick, but never bled.  Others might realize that the contents of her bladder had dried and frozen on her thighs in pale yellow crystals, but none of them would ever stop to ponder what it all meant.  A stroke or a gran mal seizure, they would say, and they would carry her away.  Dumbledore would make a somber, grey-faced announcement in the Great Hall at dinner, a letter of condolence would be sent to her presumably grief-stricken parents, and that would be that.  Rebecca Stanhope would cease to exist, and the process of forgetting would begin.

     "I don't suppose I could talk you out of this?" he asked dolefully.

     "I afraid not."  She gave him a wan smile.

     "Didn't think so, but I had to try, you know."  He ran his fingers through tousled hair.  "What do I do?"

     _Stun me and drag me back to the castle before I open a Pandora's box that I was lucky enough to close once before.  Shout from the rooftops that I'm out here screwing with Arithmancy, Runes, and Cryptology in ways that God never intended and that never would have been discovered had not nine rebellious cripples spent their Friday nights creeping down to the old storage basement.  Run screaming for the Headmaster at the top of your lungs.  Drag Madam Toad out here by the hand if you can't find anyone else.  Do _anything _but what I tell you._

"Just talk to me.  It doesn't matter what you say-you can recite the alphabet for all I care.  All I need is your voice.  It'll act as an anchor."  She rolled away from him and positioned her chair in the center of the room.

     "Anchor?"

     She nodded.  It'll help me find my way back."  He started to ask another question, but she cut him off with a brusque jerk of her head.  "Not now.  When it's over.  Whatever you do, don't stop talking.  Each word acts like a breadcrumb, and I need to follow the trail to come home.  If you freeze, I'll lose sight of the line between vision and reality, and once it's lost, it's nigh-impossible to find again.  "Do you understand?'

     He nodded, and his face had attained the hue of spoiled curds.  "I'm not so sure I'm the man for this," he muttered, his eyes fixed on the toes of his trainers.  "You need someone like Hermione.  She's first rate at all this mental huggermugger."

     "Hermione," she spat.  "It'll be a cold day in Hell before I trust her with something like this.  Snotty little bunt'd probably leave me trapped inside my own mind and call it comeuppance for my ruthless oppression of house elves."

     "Bunt?" Neville repeated blankly.

     "Yeah, bunt."  When he continued to regard her with slate-faced incomprehension, she said, "Isn't that what Malfoy called me in the Great Hall once?"  A terrible suspicion was taking shape at the base of her brain, and a heated flush was spreading from the bridge of her nose to the tips of her earlobes, unfurling like the petals of a late-blooming rose.

     "Bun-," he breathed, and then his befuddled expression gave way to a warbling guffaw.

     He shook with laughter, hands planted on his knees, the soft bulge of his paunch jiggling with tiny seismic tremors of merriment.  Beads of perspiration dripped from his pale forehead and left minute portholes to the cleanliness of earlier days on the floor.  He gave a watery snort and swiped his dripping nose on the sleeve of his robes.

     "Hunh hunh," he hiccoughed.  "Oh, Merlin, oh, sweet Persephone."  He straightened, one hand clutching his wobbling stomach.  I think the word you're looking for is bint, Rebecca."  He wiped his streaming eyes on the back of his hand.  "You haven't called anyone that, have you?"

     "No, thank God."  She studied the slender shaft of the Dicta-Quill in her hand.

     "Your secret is safe with me," he assured her, and clapped her on the shoulder.

     "Which one?" she asked quietly.

     He sobered immediately and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his robes.  "All of them," he said gravely.  "I know how important it is to keep a secret, remember?"

     "Thank you," she said, a hard lump of gratitude wedged in her throat like a pebble.  Then she blinked the emotion away and stiffened in her chair.  "Give me forty-five minutes.  If I don't come out of this by then, go straight to Dumbledore," she said gruffly.

     He nodded and retreated to the hillock of disintegrating bones.  She clutched the Dicta-Quill in numb, matchstick fingers, pressed the tip to the parchment spread over her knees, and waited, and when she heard him begin to recite the alphabet in a reverent whisper, she bowed her head.

     "Come my children, and you shall hear a tale of woe and darkest sin."  The invocation scrawled itself on the parchment, and though she had filled the quill with black ink, it reminded her of blood.  She took a shallow, shuddering breath and curled the fingers of her free hand around the armrest of the chair.  "Lies and blood and treacheries shall be revealed; have no fear, for there are neither sinners nor secrets here.  Gather round now, my little ones, and take my hand.  The Story has begun and must be borne unto its end.  No retreat, no more reprieve.  Away now, away now, the truth to see."

     Her stomach was a roiling pit of nausea, whipsawing beneath her lungs like a greasy hammock, and she was sure she was going to vomit all over the parchment, coat it with a gelatinous gruel of half-digested porridge and bile.  The quill flew across the page, and the words left in its industrious, obliging wake seared her retinas with a syrupy, amber light.  She closed her eyes to block them out.  If she didn't have to see what was happening, maybe it wouldn't be so terrible, so perverse.  

     It was a lie, of course, but she had learned over the short span of her life that sometimes lies were all that helped you hang on.  People who could not suffer the lies of another could quite happily lie to themselves if it meant that there would be another day, another week, another month to get it right.  Her parents and the parents of her friends consoled themselves with the hopeless delusion that their children would be whole someday, that one miraculous day they would simply spring from their chairs, toss their crutches and walkers aside, tear their tracheal tubes from their throats, and proclaim, "I am healed, lo, hosanna, glory to God in the Highest, Amen!"  Deep down, they knew it wasn't so, but if they could pretend there was hope, then they could get up in the morning, go to work, and not think about the tastes of gunmetal and whiskey.

     She was no stranger to the practice herself.  Each day, she told herself that she would not hate, would not let her heart turn to ash and wormwood, and each day, the bitterness grew and the emotional jaundice spread.  Hogwarts and Professor Snape had arrested the progression of the disease, but it was still there, stretching forth voracious, insidious fingers, raking infected nails across the atrophied flesh of her heart.  Despite all of that, she told the lie anew every morning and whispered it again as she drifted to uneasy dreams at night because to admit the truth was to concede defeat, and cynical as she was, she was not yet weary of the race.

     So she told herself that little white lie, just as she had sworn that she would never tell the Story again.  She had even gone so far as to help the others seed the basement with salt before they shunned it forever.  Never again, they swore, as salt sifted through their fisted fingers like dead fairy dust, but their eyes had told the truth their lips would not, and as she had stared across the circle at Jackson Decklan's averted eyes, thinking, _I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks,_ she had known it was a tie that could not possibly bind.

     Now the flimsy tie had broken, severed by distance and necessity, and she was sitting in an owlery with no more protection but what brass and a lovable, addled boy could offer.  It was madness, and she was afraid of it, but she lusted for it, too.  She was as alive as she had ever been, the adrenaline hot and electric in her veins, and even as she told herself for the twentieth time that she hoped it wouldn't work, a wild, gleam of anticipation kindled in her eyes.

     _You do want it.  Deep down in that dirty, unacknowledged part of your soul that has seen neither the light nor the restraining hand of compassion, you've been waiting for this, hoping for it.  You never wanted anything bad to happen to anyone, but now that it has, it's the perfect excuse to touch the forbidden, to exercise the power Vector is always keeping just out of your reach.  He knows, you see, knows how dangerous, how addictive it can be, and so do you.  That's why you tried to stop, an alcoholic taking those first, tottering steps down the road to perdition.  You know, but it feels too good, and you like the power it gives you._

_     It's just Arithmancy and Runes and the ancient art of storytelling.  It's a game of chance, nothing more.  What happened in the basement happened only once.  It probably will never happen again, and even if it does, there's no guarantee that what I see is the truth.  At best, it will be what is most likely to happen, and we both know that life is rarely so obliging.  It might not even work without the rest of them._

Oh, but that was just wishful thinking.  Already the cocoon was weaving itself around her, cutting her off from the outside world.  Neville was three feet and another world away, and the subdued hiss of his voice was meaningless.  Raw magic pooled in the soles of her feet and in the crooks of her elbows.  Her forearms shivered with the energy gathering there, and she grimaced.  It was going to work, all right, and she wondered for the first time if she could physically handle the stress of it all by herself.

     There had been others to bear the load before, and so it had never occurred to her just how powerful the magic in which they were dabbling had been.  Now, with the ritual barely begun, the enormity of the load was apparent.  Her eyes bulged with the weight of the gathering magic, and her ears popped and crackled with the pressure.  Her sinuses had been stuffed with wet gauze.  The quill trembled in her white-knuckled grip.

     She had heard tales in History of Magic lessons of early witches and wizards being torn apart or immolated by uncontrolled magic, and a vision arose in her mind of herself imploding beneath the unbridled magic, wet flaps of skin and bleeding tissue splattering against the walls with a gelid _smack._  In her mind's eye, Neville was frozen in place, lips still pursed to say _p_, and droplets of blood and grue clung to the tips of his hair.  From the tip of his nose hung a scrap of grey brain matter.  The image was horrible and obscenely hilarious at the same time, and a hysterical, appalled giggle bubbled in her throat.

     The magic had enfolded her completely, and everything in the owlery had taken on a queer, canted quality, an image viewed through heat-warped glass.  She was convinced that if she pressed her palm to the air in front of her, it would mold itself to her hand, and when she withdrew it, her palm print would still hang before her eyes in ghostly reminder of where she had been.

     _Like the lightning bolt in the village the day everything came unglued,_ she thought suddenly, and shuddered.

     Another memory surfaced in her mind.  _A lightning bolt that hung suspended in dead and odorless air.  It should have dissolved in a blinding flash of light, swallowed by the grinding roar of thunder and the metallic stink of ozone, but it never did.  In defiance of all natural laws, it hovered in a tumorous black sky, a jagged white-blue rend that had made her wet her pants._

     Skeletal white fingers and a voice like crunching gravel.  Someone screaming to beat the band.  And mud squelching between cramping, fleeing toes as she ran from the thing on the grass, the thing with a pariah's face, and toward the guttering beacon of sanity, and mildewed, plaster walls.   And two days later, the language of the bones made clear.

     She shook the thoughts aside and re-established her grip on the shaft of her quill.  It wouldn't do to think of _that _just now, not when walled in by magic that might not let her go.  She was going to need all of her strength to come home again; she could spare none battling poisoned reminiscences.  She cast one last look at Neville, who was still dutifully reciting the alphabet through lips the color of spoiled liver, and closed her eyes.

     _Here's to hoping we're both strong enough, _she thought, and surrendered herself to the magic.

     The sound did not fade gradually from her plane of consciousness.  It was simply gone.  Only the haunting, echoing whisper of Neville's voice remained in the tranquil white noise void, constant, low, and soothing, steady as the ticking of a clock.  _A, B, C…_  All thought and fear faded from her mind, and she felt only contentment and serene confidence.  It was all right, of course it was; the magic would not hurt her.  It was hers for the taking to do with as she would, and she wanted to see.

     She had done this a thousand times before, in Vector's class and back at D.A.I.M.S.  Thousandth verse, same as the first.  No sweat.  The formulas came to her, her secret mother tongue, and as she manipulated them with nimble, unseen fingers, the shining tendrils of possibilities past and present unspooled before her, delicate wisps of maybe.  Pink for future, green for past.  Millions of them twined and coiled in lazy, sensuous rhythm, _billions.  _As she watched, pink turned green, future becoming past.  Time held sway even here.

     She sifted with agile fingers, careful not to look at the threads that passed between her fingers.  If she succumbed to the temptation to gaze at each past secret she held in her hands, she would never leave.  She would wither and crumble to dust, and Neville, stalwart as he was, would fade with her.  Besides, she did not need to look at the gossamer threads to find what she sought.  She would know when she touched it.

     On and on it went, and the search settled into a languid, peaceful rhythm.  Touch and release, touch and release, until the movement became automatic.  The whole of existence had been reduced to an endless, undulating sea of green and pink, kelp and red tide.  Neville's voice was a dissonant, instinct drone.  Touch and release, and with each deft move movement, she cradled a piece of time in her palm.

     Touch.  _A black, formless void._

     Touch.  _Burning desert sand and the tombs of kings._

Touch.  _A bared breast and the sweet, killing bite of an asp's fangs.  An empire in ruins._

Touch.  _Steel-bellied beasts rain fire from the heavens, and Dresden burns, screaming human wicks staggering through the cratered streets._

     Touch.

     Acid and chilled steel beneath her palm.  She clenched her teeth against the surge of energy that clawed its way up her forearm and stabbed her temple.  The power in her hands was incalculable, a writhing, pernicious serpent that would destroy her if it could.  It convulsed within her desperate grip, and though the magic had no voice, she understood its meaning all the same.  _This is not for you.  Be gone from here._

     She had found the thread she sought, found the day of Potter's collapse and Professor Snape's fall from grace.  Now she had only to break the cardinal rule of Arithmancy and look at what she held.  She was not surprised that she felt no apprehension as her mental eye drifted toward the crackling, bucking strand of time locked between her unyielding fingers, only a dizzy anticipation.  She had defied the devil before and escaped by the skin of her teeth, and what she had once done for fun she must now do in earnest.

     Prudence tried one last time to dissuade her from her fool's errand, but its voice was tinny and impotent, easily smothered by the mantle of magic that felt so much like Professor Snape's traveling cloak, and so, with benefit of neither prayer nor caution, she gazed at the strand in her hand.  

     "Let the Story be told," she whispered, and let the world disintegrate.

     _For a moment, she was suspended between the worlds, bobbing weightlessly in an amniotic sac of blind timelessness.  She was neither here nor there; she existed only because she knew she did and because the soft mantra of Neville's alphabet still floated out of the nothingness in disembodied reassurance.  Lose either her self-awareness or the comforting clew of Neville's voice, and she would cease to be, snuffed like a guttering candle flame between oblivious, pinching fingers. _

     _Then she landed with an indecorous, teeth-clacking thud on gritty, biting stone, her robes puddled lasciviously around her hips.  She was in the dungeons, sprawled in the corner nearest the door like a broken, disjointed doll.  She was, in fact, right beside her waking self, a willful shadow with the breath of life breathed into its nostrils by a dark and capricious god.  She froze, hands pressed flat to the floor on either side of her body, and stared at the misshapen shell she called home._

Angles and shadows and secrets well-kept, that's what crippled girls are made of, _she thought as she gazed dispassionately at her own face._

_     She raised herself into a low crouch and scuttled toward the lectern.  Such subterfuge was unnecessary, but she could not shake the unease that settled over her like a cloying blanket, the irrational sense that her presence had profaned this place.  She hunkered behind the lectern, fingers gripping the solid edge of the wood.  Or at least she thought she was.  Her eyes told her that she was grasping the smooth wood between her fingers, but there was no corresponding sensory input from her befuddled fingers, no heft of wood or the satin slick of varnish.  It was as though they had been anesthetized.  She willed them to move, and they wiggled at the end of her hand, pallid strands of seaweed in a lazy current, but there was no commensurate tug of tendon beneath her skin._

_     Something else was amiss, too.  She was squatting less than six inches from Professor Snape, and she could not smell him.  Where his exotic allspice and parchment dust scent should have been, there was instead a sharp, sour mint smell that reminded her of freshly cut paper.  She wrinkled her nose and recoiled, rocking precariously on the balls of her feet.  She hated it.  It was the smell of hospital linens and paper toilet seat covers, the smell of absolute sterility, and it did not belong on Professor Snape.  He was the antithesis of all those things; he-and his classroom-smelled of earth and anise and warm wool.  This Snape and this room were as close and stale as a forgotten attic._

This isn't Snape, and that isn't Harry.  They are nearly two weeks away from here, one locked in his rooms, and the other lying in state in the Hospital Wing.  These are just holographic representations of Arithmantic algorithims extracted from the temporal thread, and numbers, for all their accuracy and cold efficiency, cannot convey the subtle nuances behind the angle of nose and the parabola of lips.  Some things-like the way Professor Snape smells-just are, and no amount of calibration can duplicate them.

     _She supposed that was true, but she made no move to draw closer to the cluster of calculations currently masquerading as her Potions Master.  If she did, she might touch him, and she knew it would not be pleasant.  She would either feel nothing but uniform resistance, or he would feel like hollowed papier-mache, and either possibility would send her into paroxysms of hysterical screaming.  It would be too much like touching a corpse, brushing fingertips with lifeless, remorseless probability, and that was more than her overtaxed mind could shoulder.  She balled the hand not clutching the textureless lectern into a fist and slid it beneath her shanks._

_     Things happened very quickly after that.  Everything proceeded just as she knew it would.  Harry plodded to the front of the room beneath the professor's smoldering, triumphant gaze, and from her fresh vantage point, she afforded a view of Ron Weasley's indignant, scandalized face and Hermione Granger's prim moue of disapproval.  Despite the grim circumstances, she snickered.  They looked more like virginal harridans witnessing a peep show than students watching a Potions demonstration._

Maybe they knew this was coming.__

_     The implications of the thought made her stomach clench with apprehension, and she shoved it away with an ill-tempered grunt and returned her scrutiny to the sea of expectant faces in front of her.  Draco Malfoy was perched in his eyrie, bookended by his slack-jawed, thick-browed lackeys.  The astringent logic of numbers had stripped him, too, of his alluring vitality, drained the preternatural glow from his crown of platinum hair, but he was still resplendent as he watched his nemesis shuffle to his fate, a lord at the execution of a particularly bothersome rival, and even in this cold, dead parody of the Potions classroom, a shiver of lust wracked her._

_     Potter reached for the phial of milky liquid, and then the door crashed open with a flat bang that dropped into immediate silence, and Colin Creevey burst in, a blur of crisp, black robes and pale, excited face.  He was practically dancing as he skidded into the room, and he careened into the corner of the desk.  So began the dreamy, eternal fall of the Advanced Sleeping Draught._

_     Her field of vision narrowed to the plummeting phial as it tumbled end over end toward the unforgiving stone floor.  Even Professor Snape's outthrust, desperate hand could not distract her from the slender tube's delirious descent.  This was what she had been waiting to see.  Her heart galloped inside her chest as it pumped more blood to the veins behind her eyes, and her nerveless hand was gripping the lectern hard enough to drive splinters into her fingers._

This is it.  This is where the answers lie.__

_     Another, softer voice spoke inside her head.  _The serpent, bitten by his own fangs, poisoned by his own well-nurtured venom.  The King, felled by treachery.  The Knights, paralyzed by fear.  The Dark Dauphin, watching all with laughing, quicksilver eyes.  The Mongoose, ever vigilant in the service of her old enemy, deceived before her very eyes.  The Messenger, harbinger of calamity.  Thus be named all the pieces; wherefore lies the truth?__

_     She shrieked as a surge of magic tore through her body like electrical current.  She pitched forward, throwing out her hands to keep her face from slamming into the stone floor, and something warm and wet gushed from her nose in an alarming freshet.  She groaned and rolled onto her side, and the wetness from her nose dribbled onto her chin, thick and slow as black currant molasses.  She raised a shaking hand to her face and drew it away to find dull, claret blood smeared over her fingers.  She let them drop to the floor with a meaty, indifferent thud._

I'm bleeding, _she thought with a swoon of dazed, wry humor.  _Then, a darker thought.  This is what the Story feels like when you play by yourself.  Oh, Jesus, it's like being in a decompression chamber run amok.  I'm coming apart from the inside out.  How long until my internal organs liquefy and my eyeballs burst like overripe grapes?  I should never have done this by myself.  It's too big.  I should have asked Dumbledore to let me do this in his office.  Damn my stubborn pride.  _She groaned as another wave of magic crushed her in an iron grip, and drops of blood oozed from beneath her fingernails._

Stop whinging, girl, _said her grandfather gruffly, but it was exhortation rather than rebuke.  _You've done this before, for hours at a time, in fact.  Push it back.  

     _She retched, and thin, yellow bile joined the small but expanding pool of crimson on the floor_.  There were nine of us then.  Nine of us holding up the world, and a ninth of the load is a far cry from the whole of it_.  She writhed as a cramp seized her lower back in vicious, twisting hands._

Yes, and between the nine of you, you'd be lucky to hold up a five-pound sack of flour, _he snapped.  _Yet you managed to create and sustain a world fashioned from nothing more than words and fancy for hours at a time, and you did it every week for years on end.  If you can do that-and you could and did for a long damn time-you can do this.  Just shut out the pain and push the magic away.

     Easier said than done, you bossy old coot, _she thought peevishly, and dug her bleeding, splinter-savaged fingers into the rough stone floor._

Don't tell me you can't, because I know you can, _he muttered imperturbably._

     _This conversation triggered memories of another discussion once before, one with Professor Snape as he cupped her wan, bony cheeks in warm, spicy hands and told her in his calm, stentorian baritone, that, yes, she could block out the pain if she chose it.  All she had to do was make it so.  Then allspice and parchment dust had invaded her nostrils in a pervasive cloud of tangible peace, and doubt had fallen away and taken the hot, ravenous agony with it.  In the hour of her unquestioning belief in the man who held her face in his hands, she had found rest, Glory, Glory, by God, Hallelujah._

     Drawing on the memory of surprisingly gentle fingers against her cheeks, she pushed against the smothering weight of untamed magic.  Parchment and spice and gleaming black eyes; that's what hope is made of.  She closed her eyes and willed his smell to be.  This was the unchangeable, past, yes, but it was also the Story, and that she could manipulate.  

     She focused on the lullaby whisper of Neville Longbottom's voice.  Perfectly rounded vowels and closed consonants drifted over her ears in beckoning caress.  A, B, C, D, E…Steady and sure as the beat of her heart.  Her laboring lungs eased, and her heart slowed to match the rhythm of the phantom alphabet.  She withdrew into the darkness behind her eyes, and with every measured respiration the alphabet grew louder and the encroaching magic retreated like a bested foe.

     In and out, in and out.  Her chest expanded in lazy, hypnotic arcs, and as she drew in a last deep breath before opening her eyes, a tantalizing whiff a allspice tickled her nose with teasing fingers.  It wasn't the overpowering deluge for which she had hoped, but it was enough, and she sat up and swiped a shaking hand beneath her oozing nostrils.  The magic still pressed around her in a greedy, malevolent tide, but the pressure was no longer crippling.  She tottered to her feet, swaying drunkenly, and when her equilibrium re-established itself, she shambled toward the door to the classroom.  It was time to get out of here.

     Her foot froze in mid-step, toe dangling gracelessly above the floor.  Her gaze had wandered to the figure of Colin Creevey, who was, like the other imagined occupants of the room, unmoving as a wax mannequin, outstretched palm cupped over the open top of the phial.  His face was a grinning, lupine rictus of terrified dismay, his eyes bulging from their sockets, and yet…there was something off-kilter about his expression, an underlying nuance in the corners of his eyes that she could not quite place, though a disturbing familiarity tugged insistently at the base of her brain.

     The Messenger, harbinger of calamity.  Why had the Story called him that?  If anything deserved that epithet, it was the phial of poison in his taloned hand.  That had been the catalyst for all the disaster thereafter.  Yet the Story had left it nameless, ascribed to it no significance in the grand mosaic of the truth, and instead bestowed the grim onus of calamity upon a bug-eyed, histrionic fourth-year whose only sin was to catch the blighted potion before it hit the ground.

     Intrigued, she moved closer, and then, a realization slipped into place with an audible click.  Colin had been delivering a parchment from Professor McGonagall when he crashed into the desk, and whatever had been written on it had angered Professor Snape enough to send him into a fit of histrionic, hissing, black-tongued rage.  He had, she remembered now, deducted the remaining points from the woefully anemic Gryffindor point glass and rounded on the glowering Potter with euphoric vitriol.  Could the parchment crumpled in Creevey's iron-fingered, unyielding fist shed light on the tangled mystery?

     She pulled on the corner of parchment that protruded from his stony grip, but it refused to budge.  Undaunted, she prised at his tightly coiled fingers, but the flushed digits were cemented against his palm.  

     "Christ on a cheese cracker," she muttered, and wrenched with all her might.  The cold, smooth fist moved not a centimeter.  "Damn your Gryffindor bull-headedness," she groused dispiritedly, but there was no anger in it, only weary resignation.  

     There was nothing more she could do here; the Story had revealed all that it intended to show her, and the pulsating wall of magic around her was gaining strength again, a ravenous panther crouched and ready to spring.  The hot eagerness of it wafted over her cheeks and carried with it the crisp, metallic reek of ozone.  It was preparing another strike at her hastily constructed defenses, and if it breached the nebulous wall of stale allspice that surrounded her in a protective mantle, she would not drive it back a second time.  She made a mental note to ask the Professor about the note the next time she saw him, and started for the door again.

     It was a shimmering thread that caught her attention, a gossamer filament that peeked from beneath one of Professor Snape's boots.  The end protruding from the front was pink and snaked in an unbroken line from the toe of his boot to the far wall of the classroom, where it disappeared into the damp stone wall.  The other end was green and reached from the well-oiled heel into the near wall.  She blinked in surprise and swallowed with a dry, glottal click.

     His lifeline, she thought with giddy stupefaction.  That's never happened before.

     You've never mucked about with the rules of Arithmancy, Cryptology, and Runes before, either, pointed out her grandfather prosaically.  And I'm not at all sure you should have.

     Touche.

     Her gaze drifted from one end of the thin line to the other, and a terrible compulsion seized her.  She wanted to see what had made him, drink from the deep and secret well that had sustained him for all these years and tinctured his blood with such inveterate bitterness and despair.  She could, too.  All she had to do was step forward, grasp the strand between her fingers, and let it lead her beyond the wall and into the past.  If she were pugnacious enough, she could return to the beginning and gaze upon him as he lay in swaddling clothes.  She could find the cipher, the linchpin that had soured sweet ambrosia dreams to rancid wormwood, and those burning black eyes would forsake her dreams.

     Not yours, not yours to see, chided her conscience, and it was true.  What she was contemplating as she stood in the middle of a time to which she no longer had a right was an abuse of power beyond redemption.  It was an invasion, a desecration of mind and soul.  It would be a systematic pillage of every memory, truth, and belief that he held dear, a voyeuristic glimpse at the events that had shaped and molded him.  Worse still, he would be powerless to stop it, would not even be aware of it.  Rape with total impunity.

     She was disgusted by this train of thought, and she recoiled from it in nauseated horror, but it would not leave her.  It tightened its seductive grip on her, wrapped goading fingers around her flickering moral compass and twisted it from true north.  A thousand and one justifications sprouted in the febrile landscape of her mind, beautiful as winter roses, and though she knew rot and blight lurked beneath their lush petals, she longed to touch them anyway.

     You could better help him if you but understood what made him tick, the dulcet, Luciferian voice of temptation wheedled.  He never has to know, and what he doesn't know will bring him no harm.  You can keep a secret; you've done it before, and if, in the end the things you learn help exonerate him, well, then, that's all right, isn't it?  The ends justify the means.

     You'll know, interjected her grandfather with acerbic vehemence.  You'll know.  Can you live with the knowledge of what you have done, or will it consume you, a conscience cancer that eats you alive while you look into that bleak face and tell him that you respect him and will protect him if you can?  Can you tell that lie?  Not to yourself, or to me, but to him?  Can you call yourself his savior if you know that you have debased him far more than the Ministry sons of bitches ever could?

     Everything he said made perfect sense, and yet she was going to ignore it.  She was going to see what lay beyond the closely guarded wards of Professor Snape's fortress, propriety be damned.  Curiosity was an agony in her blood, and if she did not propitiate it, it would drive her mad.  It would be her secret sin, and if it troubled her, robbed her of easy rest, then that would be her penance.

     Self-loathing cramped her stomach, and bile coated her throat.  A low moan escaped her, and tears joined the hardening crust of blood and snot on her face.  She did not want to betray the fledgling trust he had shown her in his chambers last night, prove herself unworthy of the grudging tolerance that clearly cost him so dear, but try as she might, her feet would not turn from their path, but bore her to the place where glowing green past met cold, damp stone.

     She could not look into Professor Snape's eyes as she passed.  They were wide and accusatory, and the fact that the real Professor was sequestered in his chambers a castle away brought no consolation.  She could not shake the feeling that his soul had taken up residence inside the badly realized effigy and was watching her, testing her character and her mettle with this irresistible temptation.  

     "Oh, sir," she whimpered, and staggered to the waiting, mocking thread on numb, wooden legs.  

     It crackled when she bent to touch it, a triumphant, sibilant sizzle that made the white-blonde down on her forearms prickle and the blue-veined flesh pucker into hard knots of angry gooseflesh.  She pressed the sharp, thin crescents of her fingernails into her palm in a last-ditch effort to divert herself from this awful course, but not even the bright, salt sting of blood could rouse her from the single-minded reverie that had captured her mind the moment she had lain eyes on the luminous emerald tendril.  She was going to do it.  And then Neville Longbottom fell silent.

     In the chaotic aftermath of her foolhardy decision to play this volatile, pernicious game, she would never have the opportunity to ask him why he stopped, and in truth, she didn't care.  The only thing that did matter, then, and in all the years after, was that the sudden absence of his reedy monotone jolted her from her trance, weakened the barrier she had erected between herself and the magic that sought to crush her in its lethal, implacable grip, and magic darted through the momentary breach to nip at her unprotected hip.

     She stumbled into the stone wall with a bone-rattling thump, and her teeth clicked together in her mouth with a sound like rolling die.

     "Oh, Jesus," she grunted in a thin, hysteria-laced voice.  "Oh, Jesus, what was I doing?"  Her breath came in hot, ragged gasps, and her mouth tasted of wormwood and rotten flesh.  She gagged and swayed, one ear and scalding cheek pressed against the harsh stone.

     The sound coming from behind the weeping wall was soft and stealthy, a sound she had heard in a dozen nightmares and one half-remembered daze in the Potions classroom, a chitinous, perverse clittering.  Pebbles tumbling over a precipice.

     Not pebbles.  That's an organic sound.  Whatever makes that sound is alive.  It occurred to her that once upon a time, she had known the thing responsible for that noise, had caught a glimpse of it on the barest periphery of her mortified vision, but in a rare moment of mercy, her mind would not let her remember, and she found that she was glad.  A muffled, bubbling sob escaped her, and she wrenched away from the wall and fell to her knees. 

     They are coming for him.  The cryptic thought terrified her, and she clapped a raw, bloody hand to her mouth to stifle a panicked, mindless wail.

     It no longer mattered what lurked behind the walls.  They could keep their secrets and their ciphers; all she wanted was to escape this room with her sanity intact.  She scrabbled backwards, heedless of where she went or what she touched.  Her knees were scoured and bruised, and as the left one drew level with the toe of Professor Snape's boot, it scraped the pink end of the temporal thread, and she saw.

     Shutterclick visions, fast and fleeting as fog, but potent enough to drive rational thought from her mind in a single roundhouse slap.  Baying wolves with crimson fangs.  A smug, sated toad.  Professor Snape screaming and writhing beneath the steady, gleaming wand of a blue-robed Auror.  Pain that boiled blood, shattered bones, and ground minds to dust.  The jungly reek of urine and lips colder than January frost.

     She saw it all in the instant before she jerked her knee from the thread of probability, and unlike the amorphous shape of the monstrosity that infested these walls, she remembered them all in stark, vivid detail.  She threw back her head and shrieked, a lunatic aria of blind terror, and scrambled to her feet.  The door was her only hope, and through the haze of tears, it was a thousand feet and a century away.  

     "NEVILLE!  Don't stop!" she howled.  The shield of allspice and parchment dust was fading, and if she didn't reach the door in thirty seconds, she never would.

     As if he had heard her, Neville's voice rang out in the eerie stillness, quiet but clear as the clarion of cavalry trumpets.  She gave a miserable, throttled sob and ran for the door, the vengeful, ravenous magic of the Story at her heels.  It had never forgiven her for escaping it once before, escaping and imprisoning it in a dark, sepulchral basement with salted ground, and it meant to have her.  It reached for the back of her robes with impatient, glassy fingers, and she hissed as it scorched tender flesh.  Her knees pistoned to the center of her chest, and twin tongs of exhaustion and exertion embedded themselves into her side and throbbed like an infected wound, and still the blessed door drew no nearer.  It was a mirage, forever beyond her reach.

     Push and jump, screamed the frantic voice of self-preservation inside her head.  Push and jump, or you're going to die.

     "Professor Snape, Professor Snape ProfessorProfessorProfessor," she wheezed as she gathered her legs beneath her for an impossible leap.  Please, Professor.  I need your help.  When his face had crystallized in her mind, all oil drop eyes and sallow, ivory cheeks, she anchored every fragile hope to it and leaped.  

     For Neville Longbottom, watching Rebecca Stanhope weave the threads of the Story had been the most bizarre and terrifying of his life, and he wished with all his might that he had never agreed to help her.  If he hadn't, someone more equipped to deal with the unpleasant realization that sanity and order had departed these shores, abdicated in favor of utter madness, would be here now.  Instead, he was standing upon the sacrificial remains of untold mice and reciting the bloody alphabet while his mangled Housemate wrangled with demons he could not see.  

     He wished she would stop, wished she would let him stop, but she continued to scream and flail in her chair, the quill fisted in her clenching fingers slashing across the parchment in wild, wavering arcs and misting the walls with ink like blood spatter.  She was weeping and muttering in a glottal, wet whisper that made his flesh crawl.  It was the sound of lungs clogged with pleurisy, and he shuddered.  

     Her head swiveled in his direction with the twanging creak of tendon, and the spittle dried in his mouth.  Her eyes were blank as whitewashed windows, and tears, blood and snot crusted beneath her nose and on the defiant jut of her chin.

     "Rebecca?" he said, and took a tentative step forward.

     Her hand seized the parchment on her lap and thrust it at him.  "Take," she commanded in that dead, rotten seaweed voice.

     He did not want to take it, did not want to see what was written there.  Whatever had come from this dark and terrible journey was blighted with its avaricious corruption, and he was afraid that if he touched it, it would taint him as well.

     "Take," she ordered again, and this time, he saw a flicker of the Rebecca he had come to know behind those curtained eyes.  She thrust the parchment at him.

     He took it gingerly and held it between thumb and forefinger with an involuntary moue of revulsion.  The paper felt diseased, slimy, and bile rose in his throat.

     "Dumbledore.  No one else.  Not the Aurors.  No matter what."  She spoke in a disconnected, dreamy monotone, as though each syllable carried a wrenching price.  Her eyes rolled in their sockets.

     "Are you all right?" he asked, knowing even as he spoke that it was an asinine question.  She was several thousand miles from all right.

     "No," she grunted.  She jabbed her finger at the parchment.  "Pocket."

     He stuffed the wrinkled parchment into his robes with a relieved grimace.  "What did you see?"

     She cackled.  "Dresden is burning," she said matter-of-factly, and then she pitched forward in a dead faint.


	43. The Confession of Rebecca Stanhope

     Rebecca was propped upon pillows in her infirmary bed, a quill and parchment on the tray in front of her.  She, the lifeless figure of Harry, and the unsmiling trio of Aurors assigned to hold vigil over him were the only occupants of the room, and save for the impatient shuffle of feet and the absent clearing of throats, it was absolutely still.  Madam Pomfrey made the rounds once every half an hour to be certain that neither of her charges was frothing and convulsing in their beds and then promptly sequestered herself in her cramped side office once more, no doubt hunched over the latest batch of life-saving nutritive potions to be massaged down the comatose Christ-child's slack throat.

     She wasn't sure how long she had been there, though Winky had brought her a bowl of tepid broth four rounds ago.  In truth, the entire episode was a surreal blur.  The last thing she remembered before the blackness swallowed the world was the coppery taste of blood and the saline tang of tears on her lips.  The next recollection after that was the burnt-leaf scent of sweaty blue wool and a glimpse of fine-boned, ebony hands.  Then the pinched, baleful, harridan face of Madam Pomfrey had spread over her field of vision like a diseased lunar eclipse, and awareness had fled in the face of imminent medical histrionics.

     She had awakened for the final time with the arrival of the broth and a weeping, frantic Winky, who had clambered up the bedclothes to enfold her in a breathless, goggle-eyed embrace and chattered all the while that Miss must never, ever frighten her so again.  Any retort she might have made had been cut short by a wad of yeasty bread, and the little elf had stayed by her bedside in a pique of hand-wringing, tearful worry until a grim-faced Pomfrey had ordered her away for disturbing the somnolent quiet of the Hospital Wing.

     She stifled a yawn and cast an appraising sidelong glance at the Aurors clustered around the door.  They stood at attention, eyes riveted on the far wall and their hands clasped loosely behind their backs.  Polished wands glimmered in the wan, early winter light, clutched in loose-fisted hands.  The only movement was the slow blink of eyes and the hypnotic rise and fall of their blue-robed chests.

     _One of them brought me here, _she thought, and a shiver of revulsion winnowed from the base of her spine to the nape of her neck.  Then, _No, it couldn't have been.  They're all white._  She snorted, and the one on the far left, a gangly youth no more than twenty-four, spared her a reproachful, narrow-eyed glance before returning his full attention to the scintillating vista of grey, stone wall on the opposite side of the room.

     _I assure you, the feeling is entirely mutual, you glue-sniffing twat, _she thought venomously, and curled her fingers into a petulant fist beneath the bedsheets.

     Pain flared in the beds of her nails, and she withdrew her hand from beneath the blanket and uncurled her fingers to investigate.  The tips were raw, and when she prodded one with an exploratory jab, she was rewarded with a sizzle of discomfort from the offended digit.  She stared at the raw, scoured flesh in mystified silence for a moment, and then memories began to coalesce in her muddled mind, recollections of wood she could not feel, of splinters driven into anesthetized flesh, and of an unpardonable sin averted.  She swallowed around a lump of sudden shame and closed her eyes against a roiling heave of nausea.  A miserable mewl escaped her constricted throat.

     Another beady glare from the gangly Auror.  He shifted from one foot to the other.  "Are you all right, miss?" he queried impatiently.

     "I think so, sir.  Just a mite queasy."  _I'd feel a lot better if I could jab my wand into your eye and watch you scream and convulse._

     The Auror gave a noncommittal grunt, and she fought the childish impulse to get into her chair, roll to where he stood, and tread upon his toes.  Instead, she said, "Excuse me, sir, but how long have I been here, and who brought me?"  She slurred her words to little more than a groggy mumble.

     The Auror squinted and stepped forward a pace.  "I'm afraid I didn't hear you, miss," he said in a tone of dim accusation.

     She screwed up her face and formed each word with ponderous deliberation, as though she had not grasped the peculiar mechanics of her mouth.  "How long have I been here, and who brought me?"  She flashed him a syrupy, patronizing grin.

     He stiffened and cleared his throat, and his hand came up to tug compulsively at the collar of his robes.  "Ah, yes, well, you've been here three hours or thereabouts," he said diffidently, and his eyes shifted to his colleagues for tacit affirmation.

     "Thereabouts?"  She raised an eyebrow in sardonic amusement.

     He flushed.  "As to who brought you here, that would be Mr. Shacklebolt, an Auror.  Your friend, Mr. Longbottle, nearly collided with him in the corridor."

     _Longbottom, you stupid prick, _she thought, but her face remained fixed in a saccharine, loopy grin.  "Oh.  Would you please thank him for me?  I really appreciate his help."

     "Of course," he replied, but she knew that her gratitude would never reach the ears for which it was intended.  He was already stepping away from her, dismissing her, and it was clear from the stiffness of his shoulders and the frozen set of his freckle-dusted jaw that he would not lower himself to being an invalid's errand boy.

     Not that she cared.  Shacklebolt could boil in Hell's foundry.  So could the rest of them.  They were only useful insofar as what she could gain from them, whether by coy manipulation or outright deceit.  As soon as it was no longer expedient to show them courtesy, she would waste no time in spitting in their bland, bureaucratic faces, and when Shacklebolt's burnt porcelain face passed before her, she would not hesitate, not spare him for his act of mercy.  Any errant kernels of compassion that might blossom within her breast at the sight of limpid brown eyes would be crushed by the damning blue of his robes.  Blue.  The color of serenity.  She snorted.  The color of authoritarian cowardice, and she would not be grateful to it.

     _You're being overly judgmental, _chided her grandfather, but she pushed his voice aside.  She was in no mood to be pragmatic and logical.  It was her sickbed and she'd cry if she wanted to, dammit, and besides, it felt good to be angry, to despise with neither justification nor reason, a delicious kiln heat in the pit of her stomach and the palms of her hands.  It was sweet on her tongue, clover honey, and she savored it, rolled it over her palate like a finicky sommelier.  It needed no sustenance save what it could provide, and she was content to let her head loll against the pillows and lose herself to it.

     Her grandfather was unimpressed.  _Stop wallowing.  You're being just as ugly and unfair as the slack-jawed lackwits who parade past D.A.I.M.S like it was a damn zoo or exotic freakshow, as the fanatical cretins who think that just because your professor is a first-class tyrant and terminal misanthrope, it means he must be a murderer as well, and a stupid one, at that.  Judge a man by his merits, girl, not by the clothes on his back.  That's what I taught you, not this unfounded, flailing hatred._

     She snorted and fisted her hands beneath the bedclothes again.  Lot of good _that _would do.  While she was busy evaluating them on their individual merits and applying lofty, idealistic standards of judgment, they would go right on ransacking Professor Snape's quarters, tearing his robes, and trampling his will into the dust.  No, she would fight like with like, unthinking hatred with more of the same.  Sin upon sin and indictment upon indictment until the air was black with them and the line between right and wrong had been obliterated in a miasmic cloud of means to end.  If innocents fell by the wayside in this squalid little war of attrition, then so be it.  Shacklebolt had chosen his robes, and now he could live with them.  Such were the rules of war.

     She was keenly aware of the inveterate hypocrisy of the philosophy; she didn't care.  Her time in the Story, in the place where there were no sinners had recalibrated her wildly oscillating moral compass, disentangled it from the cumbersome threads of fairness and selective consequence.  She would protect Professor Snape because she chose it, because somewhere along the torturous path from the sterile, linoleum floors of D.A.I.M.S. to the grimy, sole-worn stone of Hogwarts, they had become unwilling traveling companions, a tribe of two, and she protected her own.  Notions of fairness and hypocrisy and the legendary fork that separated the road to perdition and the path to righteousness meant nothing.  What mattered was bringing him out alive.

     _I would stand on the backs of a thousand house elves if it meant that I could stay here.  _She had said that to Hermione once, and as she looked at the Aurors from behind isinglass eyes, she found that it was true, and what was more, she would not hesitate do step on the necks of human foes, either.  House elves and people and friendships were all fodder to the clanking, grinding machinery of expediency.  The thought brought a vulpine smile to her bruised lips.  What would Granger say if she knew that her twisted Gryffindor-by-proxy Housemate had graduated from the unrepentant oppression of an adoring magical creature to the willful, pitiless exploitation of her fellows in the name of a cause?  The sanctimonious prig would swallow her tongue along with her righteous recrimination.

     She flexed her fingers and reached for her quill.  Enough pontificating.  It was time to write the letter she had intended to pen in the owlery.  The skulking presence of the Aurors precluded the use of her Dicta-Quill, and she would have be careful that none of them looked over her shoulder while she made her laborious scrawls upon the blank parchment.  Not that they would be able to decipher the snarl of loops and wobbles that passed as her alphabet; even after months of practice beneath the unrelenting lash of Professor Snape, the strokes of her hand were palsied, wavering arcs.  Better to be safe than sorry, however.

     She pressed her quill tip to the paper and watched the ink spread over the parchment like a pooling bloodstain, black as unspoken guilt.  She bit her lip, and images filled her mind, images of inexorably moving feet and greedy, outstretched fingers.  The torpid, pulsating lifeline that stretched across the floor, silent and deadly as the deceiving serpent that tempted man from paradise, offering her that which was not hers to take.  Mouth full of talc and anticipation.  A bladder sloshing with the wet, jungle reek of terror, and underneath it all in a rancid undercurrent, the surge of triumphant entitlement.  _I claim this as my payment in blood.  My love comes not without price._

She slammed the quill onto the tray and clapped a hand over her mouth.  Those memories were obscene, and she did not wish to relive them, not here, under the prying eyes of the enemy and the dehumanizing watch of a white-smocked Mediwitch on the lookout for every aberrant twitch of her eyelid.  She hoped they would remain hidden for the rest of her days, uncounted even by the omniscient gaze of God when she stood before the Throne.

     _Never that lucky.  You know as well as I do that they will follow into your dreams and grow fertile there, lush and vibrant as sweet Georgia kudzu, and once they take root, they will never leave.  They will haunt your every thought, just like Judith and Brad and those obsidian eyes that linger over the crown of your head like exploring, surreptitious fingers and comfort you even as they terrify.  They will taint your last breath, and when you are nothing but bones and fading memory in some forgotten crypt, they will mingle with the fetid rot and infuse themselves into the fabric of your shroud.  They're yours now, now and forever._

     She scrabbled for her wand with a sweaty, trembling hand and snatched it from the bedside table with a desperate moan.  It was slippery and elusive in her feverish grip, and she nearly dropped it twice before she managed to point it at the copper chamberpot tucked beneath the foot of the bed.

     "_Accio chamberpot!"_ she croaked through the choking lump of bitter, thick bile in her throat, and it zoomed toward her with absurdly merry alacrity, as though it could not wait to be pressed into its unenviable service.  It skidded to a halt against her knees.

     Her jittering wand fell from her fingers and landed on the coverlet with a muffled _whump_, but her only thought was to grab the tarnished, rough rim of the chamberpot and pull it beneath her mouth before vomit splattered down the front of her robes and pooled in the shivering hollow of her thighs.  It was a very near thing.  Her stomach spasmed, her mouth flew open in a silent, anguished scream and filled with the taste of rotten cabbage.  Another racheting burp, and her meager breakfast broth came up in a rancid, curdled stream.

     She closed her eyes to block out the sight of regurgitated broth, but there was no defense against the acrid, gassy smell wafting from the mess, and her tortured stomach revolted again with a violent heave.  Her tender fingers pressed into the icy lip of the chamberpot, and she moaned through the nausea.  Blood oozed down the sides of the pot in sacrificial offering and stippled the sheets.

     The retching never seemed to end.  On and on it went, until her throat was raw and her back felt _sprung_, as if muscle had torn from bone.  Her stomach convulsed, and her fingertips sizzled, and her head throbbed, and still it continued.  The blood pounded in her ears, and behind her closed lids, Rohrshach blots of color swirled in a dreamy, kaleidoscopic rhythm.

     _I'm going to vomit myself to death.  I wonder if this is how Potter felt in those interminable seconds before unconsciousness descended.  _Then, treacherous as morning fog,_ Maybe Professor Snape is punishing me for my liberties._

     She screamed then, a gurgling, shrill wail of self-loathing.  How dare she think such faithless, unjust thoughts after what she had nearly done.  If not for Neville Longbottom's temporary loss of nerve, she _would _have done, and yet she had the nerve to sit in mocking, high-handed judgment.  It mattered not that it had been intended as black gallows mirth; every thought was the stuff of wish or suspicion, and she had told everyone who asked, including the Professor, that she thought him innocent, and she could not afford to harbor doubts now, not even to alleviate her suffering.

     "Merlin's beard!  What's going on in here?"  Madam Pomfrey bustled from her office and strode to Rebecca's bedside.

     "She suddenly became violently ill," offered the gangly Auror imperiously.

     "Yes, so I see," snapped Madam Pomfrey, and Rebecca, who had been gulping the medicinal air in a brief moment of respite, heard the unspoken corollary of _you ineffectual twit._  It was almost enough to make her smirk, but another bout of dry heaving seized her, and she doubled over the chamberpot again.  "How long has she been like this?" demanded the Mediwitch.

     The Auror shrugged.  "Five minutes."

     "Five minutes?" spluttered Pomfrey, and a hectic flush suffused her cheeks.  "Why didn't one of you alert me at once?"

     The Auror drew himself up.  "My dear woman, that's hardly my job.  In point of fact, isn't it your job to oversee the health of the students in your charge?  I cannot be held responsible for your careless inattention," he sniffed.

     Pomfrey turned an alarming puce, and her lips pursed in a contemplative moue.  "My incompetence, did you say?"  It was a silky murmur, the antithesis of her crisp, businesslike clip, and the gangly Auror's companions took a step back in perfect unison.  Pomfrey, in turn, took a step forward.  _My _incompetence?" 

     "P-perhaps I should not have spoken so-," he began, but he got no further.

     "You wish to speak of my incompetence, do you?  I should say you have a keen eye for it, given your less than stellar performance here at the school," she hissed, advancing all the while on the Auror, who shrank back in the face of her thunderous countenance.  "You've done nothing but incite panic and terror among the students, disrupt their healthy routines, and trample their rights beneath your feet.  You do more harm than my 'careless inattention' ever could," she spat.

     "I'm just doing-,"

     "What?  Standing about the castle, not lifting a single finger to ease the chaos you have created?  Chatting up your fairer colleagues when no one is looking?  All the time you've been here, I've not seen you contribute a whit to this investigation.  Meanwhile, I'm doing my level best to care for Potter and any other child who passes through these doors.  Not only that, you expect me to brew these nutritive draughts and replenish the rapidly dwindling potions stocks."  She was scant inches from the Auror, her hands fisted at her sides.  

     "We have volunteers from St. Mungo's to assist you," he retorted indignantly, and backed up several paces.

     Pomfrey snorted and rolled her eyes.  "Volunteers," she sneered, contempt dripping from every syllable.  "You mean that pair of shambling dunderheads who have botched every potion to which they put their hands and who need three times the ingredients to produce something one-third the quality to which I am accustomed?"

     "They're doing as best they can."

     "They can't hold a candle to the school Potions Master," she said baldly.  "And I can't keep the infirmary running without him."

     The Auror uttered a short, deprecating bark of laughter.  "In case you haven't noticed, Madam, _he _is currently being held on murder."

     "Attempted murder, you twit.  And unless I've grown addled since my school days, it is still innocent until proven guilty."  She folded her arms across her chest and glared at him.

     "As if he could be anything but, being what he is."  The Auror had regained his faltering aplomb and was staring at the Mediwitch in smug satisfaction.  

     Rebecca was tempted to hurl the chamberpot at his smirking visage like a sanctimony-seeking missile, but she was too drained from her bout of vomiting, and her stomach was still slaloming uneasily in its moorings, so she settled for imagining him writhing beneath the acid, serrating torment of Cruciatus.

     "A fine Potions Master and an excellent professor is what he is, and so he'll remain until you've more than your festering prejudice and suspicions to show for it."  Pomfrey jutted her chin at him in defiance.  Rebecca fought to stifle a cheer.

     The Auror favored Pomfrey with a patronizing smile.  "It isn't your concern, any road," he purred, as though he were addressing a feckless, imprudently curious child and not an adult Mediwitch in her own domain.  "Leave the pursuit of justice to the better qualified and concentrate on your _pressing_ duties here."

     "You've already made up your mind, haven't you?" she said in incredulous disgust.  

     "Methinks the lady doth protest too much.  Mayhap you are a co-conspirator in this plot?  It seems you and Snape got on rather well."  Now it was his turn to advance, a greedy glimmer in his eyes.  To her credit, Pomfrey moved not an inch.

     Rebecca bit the inside of her cheek to quash peals of mad, nauseated laughter.  It was a joke.  Pomfrey and Professor Snape had most certainly not "gotten on".  To be fair, nor were they mortal enemies.  As far as she could ascertain from her single observation of their interaction on the day she had scalded his legs, their relationship was the same as any other that the aloof Professor maintained-one of grudging tolerance, wary respect, and occasional frosty civility.  The notion of the two of them hunched over bubbling cauldrons and hatching nefarious plots against the crown jewel of the wizarding world was mind-boggling, and she crammed the purple knuckles of one hand into her mouth to stay a suicidal quip.

     All amusement fled, however, when Madam Pomfrey drew her wand with terrifying speed and pointed it the young Auror's throat.

     "I think I have had enough of you," she murmured, and her eyes were hard and bright with loathing.  "How dare you come into _my _infirmary and make baseless accusations against me.  The only collaborating I have ever done with Professor Snape has been a good, blazing row.  A good teacher he may be, but he's also a right miserable bastard.  I am doing my utmost to see that Harry gets the proper care, and I'd sooner swing than see him come to harm, and until you've evidence to the contrary, I want you out, or Circe help me, I will Curse you into unconsciousness and go to Azkaban with a song on my lips."

     There was an ugly, flabbergasted silence, and then one of the other Aurors stepped forward, hands held up in a placatory gesture.  "Now, please, there is no need for anger and dangerous threats."

     _The hell there isn't, _Rebecca thought, but wisely held her tongue.

     The interceding Auror doffed his pointed hat and ran a liver-spotted hand through wild tufts of white hair.  "My colleague is young and rash and often speaks before he thinks."  He replaced his hat and tugged the brim until it was snug against his scalp.

     The gangly Auror opened his mouth to protest, but the older Auror shot him a gelid I-will-deal-with-_you_-later look, and he closed it, Adam's apple bobbing like a turkey wattle.

     Pomfrey was unimpressed, and her wand grazed her adversary's throat.  "I don't care.  I want him out.  Appoint a replacement if you like, but he doesn't stay here."

     The Auror nodded.  "All right, then.  Just lower your wand.  I'm sure that none of this hostility is good for your patients," he said, and his gaze drifted to Rebecca.

     _Oh, that's right.  Use the cripple as an excuse.  Any port in the storm.  _She shifted beneath the coverlet and stared at him with well-schooled disinterest.

     "As if you give a damn about that," she snarled, but her wand dropped to her side, and she exhaled slowly.  "Out.  I think it would be best if you lot gave me a minute to collect myself.

     "Of course."  The older Auror gave a curt, awkward bow and motioned for his companions to follow him.

     The gangly Auror bristled immediately.  "With respect, sir, I think it most unwise to leave the Potter boy unsupervised in her care."  He spared Pomfrey a gimlet stare.

     His compatriot rounded on him.  "You have made your opinion quite clear," he said coldly, "and quite frankly, I've had my fill of it.  Enough, boy.  It's one thing to accuse the likes of Snape, but to cast unfounded aspersions on an upstanding citizen will not be tolerated.  Maybe Minister Fudge will listen to your harebrained palaver, but I'm not.  Do you hear?"

     The young Auror looked mutinous, but he shuffled his feet and gave a desultory nod.  "Yes, sir."

     "Right, then.  Let's clear off and see about that replacement."  The old Auror turned to go, and after a moment, the others glided out.

     When they were gone, and the infirmary doors had swung shut behind them, Madam Pomfrey wilted onto the nearest bed, her shoulders hunched and her face buried in her hands.  "Sodding bastards," she said shrilly from behind them, and she sounded perilously close to tears.

     Propped in her bed with her unexpiated sin clutched in her lap, Rebecca was at a loss for words.  She could only stare at the Mediwitch who had so suddenly been shown in an entirely new light.  Gone was the brusque, detached phantom in the starched white smock, the stone-faced, busybodying entity known as Nurse, and in its place was a bewildered, exhausted, frustrated woman just trying to make sense of the madness.  The same hands that had reduced her affliction to bloodless squiggles on carefully maintained parchment now shielded shocked eyes from unspeakable private anguish, frail and brittle as papier-mache.

      She wanted to say something, but nothing seemed adequate.  _It will be all right_, the reliable standby in awkward silences and times of crisis had proven to be false comfort, and its incestuous and addled cousin, _Are you all right? _was a pronouncement of bovine stupidity, so she stared at the huffing, rocking woman on the bed and tried to tell herself that she was looking at the curtains on the window behind her.  An inexplicable lump formed in her own throat, and she swiped irritably at her prickling eyes.

     _First puking, now a bonding snivel with the school Mediwitch.  Just a grand day for me, _she thought morosely, and wild laughter bubbled in her aching throat.  She quelled it by pressing her fingers into the notched, unkind rim of the chamberpot.  

     "I don't like them, either," she croaked.  Her throat was still inflamed from the churning bile.

     _Understatement, that.  Next you'll tell her that you find her dithering ignorance about your affliction off-putting._

     Now that the words were out of her mouth, she felt stupid for saying them.  They were hardly consoling, and in all likelihood, Madam Pomfrey gave not a fig for her opinion.  If the mood took her, she could probably point out-not without strong justification-that she couldn't be said to like anyone but Professor Snape, and her affinity for him was not to be interpreted as a hallmark of good judgment.  She masked her discomfiture by dropping her gaze to the congealing brown mass sloshing in the chamber pot and bunching the coverlet between her fingers in a pained, peristaltic motion.

     _Funny how pithy wit never seems handy when you actually need it,_ she mused.

     Madam Pomfrey straightened with a watery sigh and scrubbed her blotched, wet face with one palm.  She tugged on the hem of her smock and smoothed stray locks of graying hair from her forehead.  She started when she saw Rebecca, as though she had quite forgotten she was there.  She sniffed and rose abruptly from the bed.

     "Miss Stanhope," she said briskly, though her stuffy nose caused it to emerge as _Miz Stanhob,_ "what is the matter?"  

     _I was purging my sin, and here it is in the bottom of this battered, tarnished chamberpot.  Would you like to see, Sister Pomfrey, see and prescribe my penance?  High colonic?  More broth?  Complete bedrest?  Comprehensive blood screening?  Laproscopy?  Endoscopy?  How about a spoonful of castor oil?  My grandfather swore by it.  Which of the Seven Sacraments will it be?  One?  All?  Shall I have two bowls of broth and six enemas and declare my conscience clean?  _Rebecca shrugged.  "I've felt sick since I woke up."

     Pomfrey held out her hand, and Rebecca thrust the pot into it, relieved that she didn't have to look at it anymore.  It was as corrupted and ugly as she felt, and she wanted it to disappear.

     Pomfrey peered analytically at the contents.  "Does your stomach still hurt?"

     "No, ma'am."  _My stomach's not the problem.  It's my horrified conscience, the unblinking, unclosing eye that won't look away from what I almost did.  _

Images of sinuous green threads with bleeding tips surfaced in her mind, and she shoved them away with a grimace.  The very thought of those gently undulating tendrils of time made her gorge clench, and yet there was a seething, nascent lust, too, climax not quite reached.  She tightened her grip on the bed sheets and gritted her teeth against a sour belch.

     Pomfrey placed a cool, damp hand against her forehead.  "No fever, I see."  She removed her hand.

     Rebecca grunted.  "I don't suppose I'll be going back to the Gryffindor Common Room."  It was not a question.

     The Mediwitch's lips thinned.  "Certainly not, Miss Stanhope.  I'll be keeping you here for the rest of the night for observation."  The bewildered woman was gone, supplanted by the familiar veneer of medical authority.  "No, indeed.  Quite a nasty turn you took.  Must have been, for Longbottom to react the way he did.  Shouting at the top of his voice, he was, and scissoring, as if he'd forgotten how to bend his knees.  Nearly sent Shacklebolt arse over teakettle."  

     She set the chamberpot on the bedside table with a thump and busied herself with adjusting Harry's coverlet, smoothing it and tucking in the edges.  "Little wonder, either," she continued.  "You looked wretched when they brought you in-face slathered in tacky blood and drying mucus.  You tore the finger pads of one hand to bits.  What in blazes were you doing in there, child?"  She turned to Rebecca again, her gaze sharp and searching.

     Rebecca stiffened.  "I fainted, ma'am.  I was posting a letter and came over funny."

     "Bollocks," came the unflinching reply.

     She choked on a squawk of surprise at such coarse language from an adult.  Even Professor Snape at his most poisonous never resorted to such bald crudity.  Serrated satin riposte was his knout of choice.  Nevertheless, she betrayed nothing.  No one would ever know what happened in there, least of all a meddlesome Mediwitch.  Her lips whitened in unconscious determination.

     "I fainted," she repeated in a voice hard and cold as December graveyard earth.

     Pomfrey said nothing, merely folded her arms across her chest and cupped her elbows in her hands.  _You'll not be rid of me so easily, girl,_ her eyes said, and Rebecca would have appreciated the white-knuckled temerity of it had she not been hellbent on guarding her secret.

     Rebecca squared her shoulders and gripped her knees.  _You can try and strongarm me all you like, but I'll never tell.  I can tell you the same lie until we both turn to pillars of salt and Potter has turned to sacred dust in his robes.  What's mine is mine, and if you think that you're going to pry it from me by virtue of medical might, you've got another thing coming.  You tipped your hand, and I smell the weakness in you, the clean copper of blood.  Redemption and damnation at a single stroke._

     The silence spun out between them, the irresistible force and the immovable object locked in silent combat, and then Pomfrey sighed.  Game, set, match.  Rebecca let her shoulders relax, but did not drop her gaze.  She would leave no opening for a blitzkrieg last assault.  She blinked lazily and watched the crow's feet nestled in the corners of the Mediwitch's eyes.

     Pomfrey's shoulder's slumped.  "Suit yourself, then," she muttered, and picked up the chamberpot.  "I've got better things to do than stand here and play puerile mind games with you."  She spun on her heel and carried the chamberpot into her office.

     _Probably going prospecting for evidence of my impending demise.  Wonder if she'll weigh it and keep it in a little tin like some arcane specimen of mutant effluvium?  _

     She scowled at the Mediwitch's retreating back.  Wouldn't surprise her in the least if she did.  Doctors and nurses always seemed to have a fanatical and mordant fascination with the voidings of the infirm.  They pored over each dribble and dollop as though it held the secret panacea to the world's ills, the key that would solve the enigmatic cipher of human frailty.  They weighed it, inspected it, catalogued it, and, if the illness was terminal, hoarded it for future study.

     _The Scatological Knights Templar, Guardians of the Secret Offal,_ she thought, and snorted.  Well, the woman could have at it for all she cared.  She had a letter to write.  She picked up her quill, pressed the tip to parchment, and willed her stiff, blue fingers to form the tortured letters of confession.

_Dear Jackson,_

     I'm sorry it has taken so long to write the letter I promised to send, but being here has been a huge adjustment for me.  God, this place is nothing like D.A,I.M.S.  I wish you could see it, be here with me to experience it for yourself.  It's not just a school; it's a citadel of magic.  Power bleeds from every stone, thrums in the mossy lichen that festoons the dungeons, even.  There's so much of it that my teeth throb, a constant, niggling itch that makes me want to scrub them with my tongue.  It's an incessant pressure in my eardrums and the small of my back.  I've gotten used to it, but I can never quite forget it's there.  Sometimes I wonder what they would uncover if they dug beneath the ancient foundations, unseated the stone from earth to which it has lain claim for a thousand years, and then, in my darker, more lucid moments, I decide that I don't want to know.  I learned that lesson once, and I don't need to relearn it.

_     Anyway, enough of my philosophizing.  How are you?  Has D.A.I.M.S. grown drearier for lack of my shining, ebullient presence?  Actually, don't answer that.  You're liable to give me an honest answer.  Is Professor Trask still bellowing at the top of his voice, and does the Dragon still breathe fire?  I swear I'll dance a damn jig the day you tell me that old bitch has either done us all a favor and died, or that the buffoons at the Department of Health and Human Services have wised up and fired her.  Wishful thinking on both counts, I know, and I'm not holding my breath, but everyone needs a dream._

_     I don't suppose she's relented and agreed to sell Dinks to Hogwarts?  I feel sullied for even writing that sentence-Dinks isn't a _thing_ to be traded like furniture-but you know what I mean.  The elf that they have for me here is as sweet and attentive as can be, and I love her dearly, but it isn't the same.  She doesn't sing the way Dinks does when I'm scared or sick or just plain crampy, and she doesn't whisper stories into the darkness to lull me to sleep.  I know I should be too old for things like that, but I'm not, and I miss them.  Especially now.  As wonderful as Winky is, Dinks was home, and right now, I'm homesick to the bone._

_     You'd like the teachers here, I think.  They're a trifle on the stuffy side, and I wouldn't want to break wind in front of them, but they're brilliant in the classroom.  They use magic here, really use it.  They don't just dangle it over our reaching fingers like a tantalizing artefact of Someday.  It's not a dirty word or a shameful secret.  You can work it, get your hands in it, and the school has its own thriving, independent ecosystem.  The plants we plant, raise, and harvest in Herbology are used in the Potions lessons whenever possible, and although I'm not entirely certain of this, I suspect that the Care of Magical Creatures professor uses the excrement from the animals he tends as fertilizer for the Herbology plants.  Beat _that_ with a stick._

     The teachers, for the most part, have adjusted well to having a cripple as a pupil, though my Head of House-that's what they call Student Resource Coordinators here-is a histrionic, interfering old prude with a monolithic do-gooder complex.  Each sneeze and scratch on my part is grounds for immediate inquiry by the school Mediwitch, a dour, gimlet-eyed harridan who, unfortunately, shares her propensity for gross overreaction.  My joy knows no bounds.

_     As a matter of fact, I am writing you from the Hospital Wing.  It's nothing serious, so, for God's sake, don't get your pneumatic legs in a knot.  I was in the owlery and went over a little funny, that's all.  Must've given myself a hell of a knock, too, because according to Lady Pomfrey of the Chamberpot, my face was covered in blood.  I don't remember, truthfully._

    Oh, what an ironic word that was.  There was no truth in that, none at all.  The quill jittered in her hand, and she let it fall from her fingers and clatter against the parchment with the soft rustle of dried leaves.  She furrowed aching fingers through her hair.

     _Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.  _Old Wills had that one dead-bang.

     The door to Pomfrey's office opened, and she emerged carrying a chair in one hand and trailing her desk behind her like an obedient dog, the yellow glimmer of the Summoning Charm an ephemeral leash.  Jars and phials nestled in the half-open drawers.  She set the chair between two adjoining beds, facing Potter's inert form, and then set down the desk with a gentle, grating thump.  She sat down with a graceless lurch, steepled her elbows on the barren desktop, and propped her chin on the backs of her folded hands.

     _Of course.  The vigil must be maintained at all costs.  Leave Potter alone, and someone could creep in here and finish the job, and we wouldn't want that now, would we?  Even if it might exonerate Professor Snape.  You've left me with him for an unprecedented five minutes.  Will I be getting my cavity search now, or as an after dinner delight?_

     Her capricious mind conjured the ludicrous scenario with terrible clarity.  An Auror, dressed not in the authoritarian blue robes of his office, but in elegant, fitted black robes and a cravat would sweep to her bedside, and over the crook of one arm would be a towel.  The maitre d' from Hell.  He would look officiously down his long, aquiline nose at her, and then he would say in a voice dripping with crisp, cultured hauteur, "Drop your knickers, if you please, madam."

     She clapped a hand over her mouth and huffed manic laughter into the palm of her hand in hot, breathy puffs.  It was such an absurd, _stupid _image, and yet it felt right.  As far as she had seen thusfar, the Aurors were bureaucratic and uncreative enough to do just that, and she could very well find herself bent over the hard, cold metal frame of her bed while a grim-faced Auror went prospecting in her upturned posterior like a deranged Roto Rooter man.

     That was not an image suited to quelling the giggles.  It only made them worse, and she let out a low, vibrato honk as she rocked back and forth in an unconscious effort to ease the ache in her belly and sides.  The ancient bedsprings gave a mournful creak, and it was all she could do not to fall from the bed in a gibbering heap.  The eternally rational spark of her subconscious realized that her hysterical amusement was wholly disproportionate to the thought that had triggered it, bizarre as it had been, but she could care less.  It felt good to laugh at anything, and at fifteen, she was still permitted the comfort of crude bodily humor.

     Pomfrey raised her chin from the sagging cradle of her hands.  "Are you all right, Miss Stanhope?"  Her voice was brittle, devoid of its customary authoritarian ring.

     _Oh, everything is copacetic over here, ma'am.  Just imagining an earnest Auror rummaging around in my hindquarters with a genteel, latexed finger._

Her chest cramped with the urge to yodel mindless laughter, and she sank her teeth into the sensitive flesh of her palm, tongue recoiling from the briny taste of old sweat.  When some semblance of control had reasserted itself, she removed her hand, took a fortifying breath, and forced herself to relax.

     "Yes, ma'am," she murmured.  "It's been a tense day, and I'm a bit loopy."  

     Pomfrey sighed and muttered something too low for her to hear, though it sounded like, "Aren't we all?"  Her chin drooped onto her hands again.

     Dreaded medical nemesis or not, Rebecca couldn't suppress a surge of empathy.  Pomfrey looked ravaged.  Her hair, usually perfectly coiffed, hung in dispirited, flyaway strings around her wan, pinched face, and puffy, bruised circles of exhaustion ringed her eyes.  The immaculate uniform which had once greeted Rebecca in the Headmaster's office was a faded, tattered memory, lost beneath limp, rumpled fabric, as if she had slept in it more than once, sprawled in the infirmary chairs.  The stress of Potter's collapse and the subsequent infestation of Aurors had drained her, leached her of her stolid vitality.  She was old and bowed, withered by time and toil, and all the medical knowledge she had amassed had failed her.

     _The old gods have been swept away, and there is no help for the lost.  _She thought of Professor Snape then, and the memory of his bleak, misery-shrouded face did what conventions of infirmary etiquette could not; the vulgar desire to giggle died in her throat.

     Professor Snape.  The letter.  No, the confession.  That was what was important now, not a disheveled, exhausted Mediwitch and her own guilty conscience.  She picked up her quill in clammy fingers and tried to ignore the fact that the delicate black shaft felt like bone in her hand.  She bit her lip and focused her eyes on her lilting, meandering script.

     _Can he even read this?  _Then, _It doesn't matter.  Just get it done.  You can fix it with a Clarifying Charm if need be.  Not like Professor Snape's here to stop you._

A low, pained growl escaped her at that, but she pushed down the pang of guilt that bloomed in her chest and resolutely put quill tip to parchment again.

     _What I do know is that I'll be here the rest of the night while they poke and prod and dance their voodoo rituals around a pot full of my puke.  You know how it goes.  They're all the same, whether armed with wand or syringe, and only after I jump through a thousand hurdles will they let me go back to my House.  Wouldn't want to spread the crippled pox, you see._

_     Now that I reread what I just wrote, I realize that it sounds incredibly whiny, and if I'm being perfectly honest-_she paused with a wry smirk; there was that insidious word again, oozing hypocrisy and etched into the page with mocking clarity-_I'd have to say that it is.  It's stupid, but I can't seem to stop myself.  Every time I see those white or green smocks or those dainty, tri-cornered nurse's hats that for some reason remind me of slumming nuns or Purgatory's beauty queens, objectivity flies out the window, and all I want to do is hurt them as much as they're going to hurt me with their needles and tubes and lancets dripping legal poison.  A last-ditch effort to preserve my imaginary dignity._

     They're doing the best they can with what they've got, and the nurse, pain in the ass that she may be, runs a tight ship.  But nothing she can do will ever eradicate the festering stink of this place.  She and the house elves scour this place every day from floor to ceiling, and I can still smell it underneath the piquant perfume of solvent and eau d' lavender, the stale signature of urine and blood and centuries-old sweat, the sweet, rotten pork stench of forgotten suffering.  It's ingrained in the stone now, and the industrious little elves can scrub the skin from their hands and knees, but it will always be here for anyone who knows where to look for it.

_     The gist of all this rambling is that I'd rather be anywhere but here, even back in the Common Room with my Housemates.  I never thought I'd say this, and if by some miraculous chance, you get to merry olde Scotland and let this slip, I'll deny it to the death, but I _like_ them.  Well, most of them.  There are some I wouldn't mind seeing the split end of, like those bubble-headed fools Parvati and Lavender, for two.  Spend their time in a fugue of masturbatory self-importance, twittering euphemistically about their Inner Eye.  Bullshit.  Between the two of them, they've got twenty/four hundred vision, and I'd bet my Saturday drawers they'll never see it coming when I finally work up the courage to heave them out the window.  Still, it's my House, and I've carved a place for myself in it, even if it's one most wouldn't have chosen.  It's not always a comfortable place or a kind place or even a right place, but it's mine, and I'll defend my patch of dirt until I die._

     It's funny how quickly I've reverted to the vernacular of home.  I hadn't realized until now how much British English was creeping into my dialect; I've started calling cookies biscuits.  A cookie is a cookie, dammit and a biscuit is light and fluffy and best with sawmill gravy, and I would give my right arm and some of my left to hear that surly, dry-boxed old lunch lady on the weekend shift holler, "Git yer sorry asses into the damned line 'afore I tan yer hides!"  More colorful than, say, "Miss Stanhope, please queue for lunch, or ten points will be deducted from Gryffindor," don't you think?  Ten bucks on which would get faster results, particularly if Lunch Lady were wielding her cast-iron ladle at the time.  

_     There _is a _point to this letter, and I'm getting there, I promise, but some things you just have to work up to.  I've got guts for a lot of things, but this isn't one of them, and I'm not ashamed to say so.  Besides, it's nice knowing that I'm talking to someone who's been down the same road, even if we took different detours to get there.  It's like sending a piece of me back home, and I think I'll savor that for a while._

The subdued click of a tumbler retreating from the snug socket of a doorjamb echoed in the reverent hush of the infirmary, and she looked up to see that the Aurors had returned.  The elderly Auror was in the lead, flanked by a sullen subordinate who had been with him on the original watch and a spry, exuberant young woman who trod upon the hem of his robes and stumbled into his scrawny back with a winded grunt.

     "Blast it girl, not in here," snapped the old Auror as he put out his gnarled hands to steady himself on the nearest bed.

     "Sorry, Mr. Dagleby," muttered the young woman, and her cheeks flushed rose.

      Mr. Dagleby straightened his robes with a phlegmatic harrumph.  "This," he told Pomfrey, who had risen at the sound of the turning doorknob, "is Nymphadora Tonks; she'll be the replacement Auror on this rotation."

     "Just Tonks, if you please," she said, and smiled broadly.

     "Pleasure," came the reply, though Rebecca saw Pomfrey's eyes widen imperceptibly, as if she thought the Auror was going to set upon her in a sudden fit of blind fury, and crepe-soled feet retreated toward the desk and its twinkling contents in a protective hunch.

     _Curiouser and curiouser,_ she mused, and pretended to be looking over her letter.

     If Tonks took notice of this strange behavior, she gave no sign.  She sauntered to Harry's bedside and gazed at him, hands stuffed into the pockets of her robes.  Her face was somber and shadowed, and the effervescent, toothy smile faded from her lips.  She pursed them and rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet, and after a moment of quiet contemplation, she withdrew her hand from her pocket and smoothed an untidy forelock of black hair from his sallow forehead.  

     "Wotcher, Harry," she whispered, and there was such pained tenderness in it that Rebecca looked away.

     _Good Christ, _she wanted to shout, _he's just a boy!  A boy with brass balls and more luck than brains.  Life will go on if he falls.  The sun will hold its place in the heavens, and the stars will twinkle in the firmament.  Professor Snape will be dead, but that's no skin off your noses.  Why all this weeping and gnashing of teeth?_

_     You know why.  Because he is hope and righteous might made flesh, and to lose him would be to lose their totem against the dark and the monsters it hides.  They need him, or the fairy tale crumbles, and that would be more than they could stand.  Besides, that's not what's really bothering you, is it?_

_     Shut up, _she hissed, but there was no rancor in it.  Her grandfather's voice was right.

     Seeing Tonks' hand caress Harry's cool, waxy faces evoked a wrenching déjà vu, stirred the dust from memories best left undisturbed.  Her fingers tingled with the fleeting remembered sensation of fevered skin and brittle hair, and she scrubbed her hand against the cool linen bedsheet to quell it.  Not so long ago, she had been on the other side of the looking glass, and it had been her hand that had offered meager solace to the dying as the ravenous cancer consumed the body and mind beneath her trembling palm.  She had been the one breathing useless terms of endearment over an unresponsive face, and she had been the one who had tried to pretend that hope still had a place in those charnel house halls, just as Tonks would when duty and Mr. Dagleby called her away.

     _Go away, _she thought fiercely.  Old wounds were being scraped raw afresh, and she had spent the last four years trying to bury them, blot them from the record of her consciousness.  Tonks and her mournful hands had undone it all, and resentment festered in her chest like long-dormant infection.

     But Tonks didn't go away.  She looked up at Rebecca and smiled ruefully, and then she came around the end of Harry's bed to stand at the foot of hers.  She craned her neck at the parchment on the tray.  "Writing a letter?" she asked.

     Rebecca's first instinct was to cover the untidy scrawl with one hand, block it from prying eyes, but common sense told her that doing so would only draw more attention to it, and so she pressed her hand into the linens and smiled.  "Yes, ma'am.  _Go away, you nosy bitch._

Tonks came around the side of the bed and peered more closely at the letter.  "To a friend, is it?"

     "Yes, ma'am.  A friend in the States."  It was a valiant struggle to keep an antagonistic snarl from her voice.

     Tonks raised a slender eyebrow.  "To the States?  Mind if I look it over?"

     "Not at all."  

_     Oh, yes, yes I do.  I mind it more than you could possibly imagine because I know what you're looking for with those inquisitive blue eyes and eyebrows so pink they make my eyes water, but I can't say a word.  After all, I'm gormless and docile, the complacent little spastic.  One wrong move ruins everything.  But you can bet I mind, and there will be a reckoning for every liberty you take here, to borrow a phrase from one of the most concisely eloquent men I have ever known._

     Tonks plucked the letter from atop the table and scanned it.  Her lips pursed, and her eyes narrowed, and after a moment, she drew it closer to her face.  She shifted from one foot to the other, and Rebecca swallowed a gleeful snigger.  Her atrocious penmanship had its uses, apparently.  

     Tonks turned the parchment onto one side.  "Not very legible, is it?" she said prosaically.  She rotated it the other way.

     Rebecca did snigger then, a sardonic, admiring chuff.  "I guess not.  I usually use a Dicta-Quill, but I don't want to disturb him."  She jerked her head in the direction of Harry's supine form.  "One of the professors was teaching me write, but-," she paused for a single heartbeat.  _I'm on the deathwatch for him now, just as you are for him.  "_-he is busy at the moment," she finished softly.

     Tonks lowered the parchment, and her eyes were twin searchlights in her face, sweeping over her sharp, angular face with scouring, groping light.  The gaze was so sharp, so _knowing_, that the spittle soured on Rebecca's tongue, and the thin flesh of her stomach rippled with cold tendrils of dread.  She wanted to sink into the pillows and pull the coverlet over her head, hide from that probing stare, but she held her ground.  She would not give a single inch.

     Her heart thundered in her ears, and the dusky tang of greenstick woodsmoke filled her mouth, but she only blinked and scratched the side of her nose with a numb finger.  It was too late to cover her mistake now; anything she said would only arouse more suspicion.  

     _Quiet and vacant wins the race.  _

     Neither did Tonks speak.  They simply stared at one another in silent appraisal.  Then Tonks replaced the parchment on the tray with the briefest flicker of a smile at the corners of her impish mouth.  

     "Well, it's not bad for a novice attempt," was all she said.  "Keep at it; it'll turn out right in the end."  She retreated from the bedside.  "Wotcher," she said solemnly, and turned away.

     "Tonks, stop wittering with the invalids and get to your post," barked Dagleby disagreeably.  Then his eyes settled on Rebecca's hunched form, and his gaze softened.  "Begging your pardon, miss.  Poor figure of speech."  He touched two fingers to the brim of his hat.

     There was something so old-fashioned and endearingly Victorian in the gesture that a smile escaped her before bitterness could crush it.  "None taken, sir," she said.  

     "Sorry, Mr. Dagleby, sir," Tonks muttered, and hurried to her post with a last surreptitious glance at Rebecca.  Dagleby followed with a derisive sniff.

     She had expected that Pomfrey would return her desk to its customary place in her office once the cadre of Aurors resumed their posts, but she did no such thing.  Instead, she sank into the chair behind it with heavy sigh and buried her head in her hands.  She moved with ponderous care, as though all the years of her age had settled over her bones at once and seeded her joints with ground glass.  Her shoulders drooped with exhaustion.

     All of her life, Rebecca had dreamed of seeing the shoe of infirmity and crushing fatigue on the other foot, fantasized about it the way other children fantasized about meeting princes from forgotten lands or stumbling upon the untold riches of El Dorado.  She had imagined sneering at her tormentors as they crumbled beneath the burden of the sentences they so casually passed on their charges, and the thought had filled her with malignant hope.  She had vowed, lying on their papered examination tables and flinching from the acid prick of their merciless needles, to live long enough to see her dark fancy come to fruition.

     The fruit was bitterer than she had ever imagined, and there was no joy in it, only a heaviness in her roiling gut and a diffuse sense of dread.  Physicians and their helpmates were immune to the ravages of time and toil.  No disease could touch them, no malaise bring them low.  It was a gift from the oath they had sworn when they had taken up the healing sword and garbed themselves in white wool strong as armor.  They were untouchable, standing in open defiance of God's rapacious, wrathful hand.  She had seen it a thousand times-doctors hale and whole while everyone around them fell to Death's scythe, their only defense their arrogance and a strip of sterile cotton over their mouths.  To see Madam Pomfrey so exposed, so shorn of her usual confidence was yet more proof that the scales of blissful innocence had fallen from her eyes.

_     Don't think about it, _she chided herself.  _Just finish the damn letter so you can bring the emotional dampers down for the night._  She put quill to parchment for the third time; her hand was mutinous now, unnerved, and it took several false starts before she formed a legible stroke.

     _While I was in the owlery, I got to thinking about the game we used to play.  You know, the one where we all sneaked down to the basement and pretended to be knights, warriors, mages, healers, and princesses.  You were a mighty broadswordsman, if memory serves, and I was pretty mean with a bow, if I do say so myself.  God, our imaginations were so vivid that it was almost _real._  I still remember cool, damp earth between my toes from the last time we played._

_Do you still think about it?  I know we stopped playing because somewhere along the line, it stopped being fun, but it's never been far from my mind.  I think hard on it now and then, lying in my bed with my fingers laced behind my head and staring into the blackness of the canopy.  I ponder and wonder if my memories of it are true, if it really was as intoxicating as memory allows, or if nostalgia is filtering the colors until only the dulcet hues remain.  You were always the more grounded one, you and your stump-legged pragmatism.  Was it as exhilarating as I remember?_

_I'm asking because I hoped you might be willing to play again.  It'd be a taste of home, a way of keeping in contact with all of you while I am here.  The friends I have made here are lovely, but I've yet to feel that universal kinship that I had with you.  Their road ain't my road just yet, I guess you could say, and Lord, I can't believe I just wrote "ain't."  Every English teacher I have ever had is wearing ashes and sackcloth as we speak.  See what a ruinous influence you are?_

_You don't have to play, and you certainly won't wound my feelings if you don't, but I sure would appreciate it, and it might help to set my mind in order about some things that have been niggling at the back of my mind.  The bones are harder to read when the earth they're buried it won't settle.  I'll leave the riddle to start the game after my signature, and if you want to play, you can, and if you don't, you don't._

I hope this letter finds you well.  Give my love to Dinks, and if it's not too much trouble, put some red North Florida clay in the return post.  In all likelihood, the drooling fools currently conducting health inspections at the school will confiscate it as contraband, but it won't hurt to try, and if even a fingernail full makes it through, I consider it a success.  You never know where home is until you leave it, and you spend every minute away trying to find the road back again.  I miss and love you all.

_Love,_

_Rebecca_

_P.S.  Here is the riddle.  Use it well, and good luck._

_Here be the black-eyed, ivory serpent, poisoned by his own fangs_

_There sits the mongoose, holding vigil o'er former foe_

_Both watch the slumbering princeling, key to all life._

_The dark dauphin holds court, while the warclouds gather._

_Blue wolves with dripping muzzles circle on greedy paws,_

_And over all the pall settles, harbinger of disaster and woe._

_All the pieces I have named; where lies the truth?_

_Name it and fear no sin._

Her quill paused in mid-stroke, and her gaze wandered to Madam Pomfrey, silent and hunched over her desk, a feeble maunt who had discovered too late the wages of hubris and now sought absolution in the final hopeless hours.  Her throbbing hand found the strength for one more postscript.

P.P.S.  Some dreams are better left unfulfilled, and some truths better left unknown.  Ignorance is often the safer road, for all the enticements of lurid curiosity.  I only hope I retain a shred of mine when the last mile of my race has been run. Pray for me, that the Lord has the wisdom, decency, and mercy not to grant my every wish.

     She dropped her quill and massaged her aching wrist with the ball of her thumb.  This was the longest she had ever written in a single sitting, and she was going to pay for her industry in the morning.  Even so, she was certain that she hadn't written enough, that without proper points of reference, her oblique allusions to serpents and mongooses and dark dauphins would leave him stymied and certain that her trip across the pond had robbed her of her faculties.  

     Ordinarily, she would have included runes and general information about the symbolism in each name, but the moment she scrawled Professor Snape's name alongside that of Saint Potter's, the alarm bells would sound, and her letter would be pored over and dissected with ruthless fervor, never to reach its destination, and when they had wrung every secret from the ink and parchment, they would come for her and strip-mine her soul until all that remained was a tattered husk that rocked and crooned and marinated in its own urine.  Madam Toad would be only too happy to oblige them.

     _Yes, well, you'll be seeing her anyway after Longbottom's indiscreet caterwauling.  One can hardly overlook the fact that a student bowled over an Auror, bellowing at the top of his lungs.  Especially not when the same Auror carries Hogwarts' only crippled student to the infirmary like a swooning virgin rescued from heathen sacrifice._

_     I've always wondered about your fascination with sexualized metaphors, Grandpa, but now isn't the time._

     Her gaze fell upon the letter, and she shuddered.  The ink was still wet, and in the dim, dozy light, it seemed to her that the parchment was bleeding, oozing sin and blood from its pores.  She reached out and turned it facedown upon the tray, then scrubbed her much-abused fingers on the coverlet.  She didn't mind the pain that lanced from fingertip to wrist in sharp, darning-needle arcs, nor did she lament the faint, rusty crescents left on the sheets.  They were part of her penance.

     _My scarlet letter,_ she thought, and a wry snort escaped her.

     She wanted to burn it, burn it in a flash of purifying fire and spread the ashes to the wind.  Every line was fraught was deceit and calculated manipulation.  It wasn't fair.  It was using the cruelest of leverage against someone whom she cared for very much, luring him into a terrible snare by calling upon old loyalties that were already fading.  

     That was the worst of it; the bond _was _fading, and there was nothing she could do about it.  His face, once so clear in her mind, was slipping away.  She could no longer remember the slope of his nose or the jut of his chin.  Sometimes, just before sleep whisked her to tumultuous dreams, she would catch a fleeting glimpse of him, of smooth, dark flesh and deep brown eyes, but more often these days, she saw only polished titanium pistons. Her friend had been reduced to the sum of his inhuman parts, and now she was knowingly(_and with malice aforethought, _her mind supplied judiciously)leading him down the road to perdition on behalf of a man who would crush her beneath his heel if given the chance.

     _Except he wouldn't.  Not anymore.  You've reached a détente.  He doesn't like you, but he doesn't want to hurt you, either.  You wouldn't agree to be alone with him in his private quarters if you even suspected malicious intent.  Your sense of self-preservation wouldn't allow it._

_     And yet, I would sacrifice someone who would die for me for someone who gives less than a damn if I live or die.  Not just offer him up, mind, but do it with no hesitation, no second-guessing.  I'd do it with a smile, and I don't know why.  Jackson told me more than once that I was sunshine on a cloudy day.  He even sang that sappy Temptations tune to make me feel better during a stint in the infirmary.  He doesn't deserve this, but I can't stop.  I can't remember enough of him to keep myself from making him an unwitting martyr to a doomed cause.  There aren't enough condemnations in all the tongues of Man to describe what I have done and what my choice will ask of me.  What does it say about me?_

But that question was too terrible, too enormous, so she closed her eyes and rolled onto her side.  She needed to sleep, sleep and rid herself of her throbbing hand and the guilty nausea in her stomach.  

     In the soothing darkness behind her closed lids, the last words she had written etched themselves in fire.  _Pray for me, that the Lord has the wisdom, decency, and mercy not to grant my every wish._

She would not be so lucky.

     She had retreated so deeply into the temporary sanctuary of sleep that she did not stir when, thirty minutes later, Nymphadora Tonks scooped up the letter as she excused herself from her post for a trip to the lavatory and slipped it, unnoticed, into the pocket of her Auror's robes.


	44. Puzzling the Riddle of Secret Threads

Chapter Forty-Four

     While Rebecca was dozing and trying unsuccessfully to dodge the cruel whims of nightscape dreams, Dumbledore was seated behind his desk, her letter in his hands.  On the other side of the desk sat Professor Faustus Vector, elbows upon his knees, and a roll of antacid tablets in his hand.  Across the room, Kingsley Shacklebolt lounged in his by now habitual seat, legs crossed and one foot bobbing to the beat of unheard music.

     "What do you make of this, Faustus?"  Dumbledore pushed the parchment across the desk with the tips of his fingers and leaned back in his chair.

     Vector peeled a thin strip of foil from the roll of tablets and popped one into his mouth in obdurate persistence.  Then, he brushed his fingers on the lap of his robes and picked up the letter.  "I think," he said slowly and between muffled crunches of antacid, "that there is no way in Hades she should be capable of this type of Arithmancy.  She's too young, for one thing, and for another, I'm not altogether certain _what _it is."  He squinted at a scrawled line near the bottom of the page, winced, and tossed it onto the desk again.

     "What do you mean?"  Dumbledore reached for his steaming cup of tea.

     Vector moved as if to stow the dwindling roll of antacid inside his robes, then thought better of it.  "Well, Headmaster, it _is_ Arithmancy, but it's not any discipline I've ever encountered, and, as you know, I'm well-versed in several.  It's a mishmash of known theories and ideas that, insofar as I know, no rational mind has ever contemplated, or at least never discussed publicly.  Hoodoo magic, to be crude."  He sighed.

     Dumbledore adjusted his spectacles and peered at the parchment.  "I must confess its relation to Arithmancy escapes me.  The Runic implications, on the other hand, are quite clear."

     "The calculations in basic Arithmancy aren't as important as they seem at first glance.  They're a focal point designed to clear the mind of extraneous information while the person works.  The beginning practitioners need them, but the more adept can circumvent them if they wish.  Most, however, prefer to keep them, as they are useful in defining the boundaries of a given search.  Once the parameters have been established, it boils down to plain old statistical probabilities.  Hard numbers.  From the looks of this-," he tapped the parchment with a callused forefinger, "-Miss Stanhope has dispensed with all formality and proceeded straight to exigent extrapolation based on hypothetical data."

     Dumbledore took a sip of tea and swirled it over his tongue, savoring the tart, smooth warmth.  Then he replaced his cup on his saucer with a dainty clink.  "Alas, Faustus, though I can use Arithmancy in certain metallurgical and alchemical equations, these theories are beyond my ken."

     "They're on the barest periphery of mine," he conceded, and plucked another tablet from the roll in his hand.  "Not the first part, mind; statistical probabilities are the core of Arithmancy, and I'll wear naught but a gunnysack and a smile if I can't fathom _that_,but exigent extrapolations are another kettle of fish entirely.  Dangerous.  Mixing emotions and personal experience with precise mathematical calculations is a volatile business, indeed.  Emotions require irrational input, unstable input not governed by the strictures of bloodless, impartial numbers.  Once the process is destabilized, everything is up for grabs."

     "What do you suppose she was doing?"

     Vector straightened and shifted in his chair with a grimace.  "In a nutshell?  She broke the cardinal rule of Arithmancy-she looked at the threads of time in her hands.  Once you look, objectivity is a dream.  She had the power of the world in her hands, and it pulled her in."  He grunted.  "Mind if I have a spot of tea, Headmaster?  These blasted Muggle remedies taste like talc.  Bloody useless, too."  He stabbed one of the chalky discs into his mouth and chewed it with vengeful asperity.

     "Certainly."  Dumbledore reached for the silver tea set on the corner of his desk and poured a cup of tea.  "Why do you continue to take them?" he asked as he passed him the cup.

     A dismissive, careless shrug.  "Force of habit.  A placebo so that I can tell myself I'm doing something to stop the relentless erosion of my stomach.  Rubbish, of course, but it passes the time, and I don't know a man alive that doesn't have at least one lie he tells himself in order to stay the course."  He laughed, a rusty chuckle that spoke of sparing use.

     Dumbledore said nothing, merely passed the sugar and serving tongs over the desk.  He was well acquainted with the sibilant, siren language of the necessary lie.  They had been his sordid bedfellows through fifty years of war and wary vigilance.  _Just one more life, one more painful sacrifice_, he had consoled himself times without measure, and yet there had always been another, and another, and still one more, each a bloody brick in his private wall of shame.  Long after the false, anesthetizing comfort had waned and left behind only an addict's gnawing, desperate need, he had clung to it, until it was a threadbare tatter in his tremulous hands.

     Here he was again, playing the same old games, swaddling himself in the same moldering delusions.  The platitudes he was so quick to offer Severus in the chilled fetor of the dungeons rang hollow in the deceptive warmth of his office.  He was not at all certain that Severus would survive this Ministry inquiry; in fact, the pragmatic part of him, the part that had allowed him to send enthusiastic, fresh-faced youth to die in the unceasing grist mill of war while he barricaded himself inside his impregnable ivory tower of lofty, impossible ideals and told himself that it was for the best because they would need his wisdom and experience in the more grueling battles to come, understood that his Potions Master was likely going to die beneath the gelid lips of a Dementor.  But that was a truth he was unwilling to face, a failure he could not accept, and so he permitted himself the luxury that things would be all right.

     "If a reduction of your lesson load would help in that regard, it can be arranged," he offered, knowing full well that Vector would be flayed by inches before he delegated his teaching duties to anyone else.  He was dedicated, as fiercely protective of his piece of academe as Severus.

     "With respect, Headmaster, you can stuff that suggestion in the legendary circular file," came the inevitable retort, and Vector straightened in his chair.  "It's not the lessons.   It's-," his hands groped for the mot juste that eluded his working mouth, "-it's just-just _life!_" he hissed, and threw up his hands.

     He did not need elaboration.  More loquacious wizards had tried, with their eloquent wittering and gaudy verbiage, to express the helpless frustration of a world locked in a struggle for survival against itself, but none of their high-handed ostentation explained it so clearly as that single bewildered exclamation.  It carried with it bitterness and fury and fraying defiance, and it buoyed him even as it broke his heart.

     The war against Voldemort had never truly ended, just as the struggle against Grindewald had never had a definite end.  One flowed into the other, a rancid tributary wending into the polluted mouth of a mighty river.  Oh, there had been celebrations, unfettered joy, unbridled revelry, and hopeful reconstruction, but they had always been looking over wary shoulders with bated breath, dimly, painfully aware that the peace they had gathered from the smoldering ashes of their lives would not last, that in the stead of one toppled foe would rise another.  Men slept in their beds and made love to their wives with wands stowed beneath the pillows, waiting for the next call to arms even as they prayed never to hear it.

     Hadn't he known as much when he had ordered Hagrid to retrieve Harry from the wreckage of his parents' house and bring him to the doorstep of Muggle relatives who would despise him and begrudge him the very air he breathed?  As the world had been deliriously proclaiming a child's improbable victory, he had been delivering the infant into eleven years of drudgery and abuse because he had known that one day Fortuna's capricious wheel would turn again to the abyss.  While his countrymen and his fellow wizards throughout Europe had been singing hosannas to the hope for tranquility eternal, he had been preparing for the ugly eventuality of another war.

     The intervening years between Voldemort's unexpected fall and his perverse resurrection had been a nightmare for those who could see beyond the halcyon present into the bilious future, and Faustus Vector, like the rest of the Hogwarts staff, had paid a price for his vigilance.  Time and constant fretting had eroded the lining of his stomach and carved cruel grooves into the formerly smooth flesh of his face.  He was forty-seven going on one hundred and twenty, and every day, another line took its place upon his face, stripe from the castigating lash.  He was twice divorced, both unions uncounted victims of a war not yet waged and that would never end.

     When the first faint stirrings of Voldemort's presence had reached listening ears, he had been among the first to accept the truth, had vowed to protect the students in his charge with his life, and though he had not yet been faced with making the most terrible of sacrifices and sealing the oath he had taken with his blood, he had proven as good as his word.  He had not been initiated into the Order, but he often patrolled the school corridors in the dead hours between the witching hour and the bloodshot eye of dawn, woolen nightclothes flapping as he crept along with his wand at the ready, and when Severus was too weak from his unspeakable dealings with Voldemort, he often shouldered his nightly patrols as well without a word of complaint.  In short, Faustus Vector was as qualified to bemoan the sorry state of wizarding affairs as anyone.

     Dumbledore drowned his empathy in a swallow of rapidly cooling tea and said, "Would this disregard for the fundamental laws of Arithmancy explain her alarming state when Kingsley found her?"

     Vector sought solace in another cooling tablet and exhaled sharply through his nose.  "It might, but as I said, there is more than just Arithmancy here.  That poem at the end of it, for example, sounds like Runes, and yet she assigned no discernible or known rune to anything.  It would help if I could read it, but looking at that untidy scrawl for too long makes my eyes throb.  Why didn't she use a Dicta-Quill?"

     Dumbledore steepled his fingers beneath his chin.  "Perhaps she did not want to disturb young Harry."  His eyes shifted to Kingsley, who spared him a knowing glance before returning to studious contemplation of the blank parchment on his lap.

     Vector gave a noncommittal grunt.  "I don't suppose you got anything useful out of Longbottom, eh, Mr. Shacklebolt?"  He peered wearily at the Auror through half-lidded eyes.

     "Regrettably, no.  He was so intent on getting me to the owlery that all he gabbled about was how I must hurry because she was bleeding."

     Dumbledore frowned.  "It was bad, then?"

     Shacklebolt thought for a moment.  "Well, it did give me a nasty turn when I first saw her sprawled facedown in the dirty straw.  There was a lot of blood, but then, the nose can produce a lot of blood with very little damage.  I suspect Mr. Longbottom was just frightened out of his wits."

     "Perhaps I'll have a word with both of them in the morning."  He scribbled a reminder a piece of blank parchment in front of him.

     Shacklebolt's foot ceased its drumming.  "I would advise caution when you decide to speak to Stanhope.  Umbridge is keen to interview her as well.  Has to stick her nose into every pudding within reach, and if she even suspects your visit to be anything but teacherly worry for an injured student, she and Dawlish will descend upon the girl like a pair of black flies.  Not only that, but she'll whisper more poisoned nothings in Minister Fudge's ear about surreptitious mind control or the foment of revolt against the government."  He drummed his long, supple fingers against the arm of his chair, gentle and thoughtful as a misting rain.

     "Balderdash!" snorted Vector with unexpected vehemence, and Fawkes gave an indignant trill.  "_They're _the ones bent on controlling every thought that enters a pupil's head, what, with their bleating about the dangers of exposing students to practical application of Defense Against the Dark Arts.  You remember, Headmaster.  They spent months trying to cajole the school Governors into restricting the teaching of Defense to theory only.  They said it was too dangerous to allow the students access to such knowledge before they came of age."  His lip curled into a disbelieving sneer.  "As if learning to defend themselves would lead them to the Dark.  Based on the messes Pomfrey cleans up in the corridors and the infirmary after a duel, I'd say they were doing well long before we came along."

     "I do, indeed."  Dumbledore placed his empty teacup upon its saucer.  "Fortunately, they were unsuccessful."

     Vector smoothed his robes, popped the last of his antacid tablets into his mouth, and pocketed the empty foil.  "Rumor had that it was a close vote, decided by one," he murmured.  "We spent weeks in the staff room trying to figure who had cast the deciding vote against the measure, but none of us could figure who it had been, not even Quirrell, and aside from his stutter, he was sharp as a rapier.  Of course, that might have due to…extenuating circumstances," he finished lamely.

     "Lord Voldemort's face protruding from the back of his skull?" Dumbledore supplied mildly, and reached for a sherbet lemon.

     Vector tried to cover the instinctive flinch at the sound of their nemesis' name by running his fingers through his graying hair, but it was a poor job of it.  He, Dumbledore, had seen it too often to be fooled by such contrivances.  It was always the same, the brusque, convulsive rippling of goose-pimpled flesh and the grimacing retraction of lips from teeth that transformed them for a moment into snarling vampires.  Fifteen years had not diluted the name's power.

     "Yes, that," Vector said bitterly.  "I've been over it a thousand times in my mind on the nights when sleep won't come, and I still don't see how we could have missed it.  He was _right there._  We ate next to it, and we never noticed.  He shuddered.  "We should have."

     "What's done is done, and you did the best you could.  If anyone should have seen, it was I.  You are not to blame."  

     Vector grunted, but he did not refuse the proffered absolution.

     Despite his words, furious, helpless shame welled in the pit of his stomach.  Vector was right.  They should have seen.  _He _should have.  He was the regarded as the most powerful wizard of the century, a title he had accepted with few qualms and come to consider an entitlement of his office and his years, and yet the living, tumorous darkness had crept into the castle unremarked, stolen in and feasted on his bread, slept in the linens he had provided, and he had been oblivious.  There had been no tremor of realization, no icy fingers tickling the base of his aged spine in dire warning.  Had things not gone as they ultimately had, it was probable that Quirrell would still be flitting about the castle, harboring their greatest enemy beneath his unwieldy turban.

     Hardly a ringing endorsement of his competence, especially when the scalding clarity of hindsight afforded him so many undeniable clues.  Quirrell had steadfastly refused to remove the purple turban from his head, even when temperature in the staff room soared to the nineties, and Severus, in a rare concession to human frailty, unbuttoned his billowing robes to let the warm, stultifying air dry the sticky sweat that plastered his linen shirt to his thin chest.  In retrospect, it should have been a dead giveaway, but he had blithely chalked it up to sartorial idiosyncrasy.  After all, he had a plethora of fashion quirks to call his own.  His naiveté had been staggering.  And inexcusable.

     "You know, I'm not as surprised as I should be about this."  Vector gave a mirthless chuckle and rested his elbows on his knees again.

     Something in the professor's tone commanded his attention.  "What do you mean"" he demanded, and sat forward so abruptly that his chair gave a strident creak of alarm.

     Vector shrugged.  "There's more to her than loose bones and blue-veined skin.  I can feel it coming off her skin in waves, perfume that's gone sour.  Venom and bile and curdled, bull-headed stubbornness.  She's polite as I could want, and I've never had to reprimand her, but I don't trust her.  She'd hurt me if she could, sink her teeth into my throat with a smile."

     "I see."

     Vector coughed into a loose fist.  "If there is nothing else with which I can assist you, Headmaster, I need to return to my office.  I've parchments to mark before supper."

     "Of course," he murmured.  He was still mulling the forthright assessment of Rebecca Stanhope's character.  "I need not remind you that this matter is not to be discussed outside this office?"  He peered over the tops of his half-moon spectacles.

     Vector rose with a pained grimace, one hand groping fruitlessly inside the pockets of his robes for antacid tablets.  "No, you don't, sir.  The less that lot knows, the better."  He shot Kingsley an apologetic scowl.  "No offense."

     Kingsley inclined his head in acknowledgement.  "None taken."

     Vector trudged to the door.  "And they had the brass to call Moody a raving nutter," he grumbled, and then, with a surly wrench of the door handle, he was gone.

     When the door had closed behind him, Kingsley rose from his seat to take up the one vacated by the departing Arithmancy professor.  He crossed his legs with languid grace, folded his hands, and rested his chin on their smooth backs.

     "Are you all right, Headmaster?" he prodded when he made no move to resume the conversation.  "You seem tired and troubled."  His voice was the throaty rumble of a contented lion.

     "I _am _tired, Kingsley," he conceded.  "More tired than I have ever been."  He removed his spectacles and tossed them onto the desk with uncharacteristic carelessness.  They skidded over the polished surface and came to rest against a jumbled pile of school supply re-order forms on one corner.  He scoured his face with the palms of his hands.

     Kingsley, Circe bless him, said nothing for several minutes.  Instead, he studied the immaculate cuticles of his nails and the fine embroidery of the hearthrug.  When he did speak, there was no rebuke in his voice, only infinite patience.

     "You have doubts."

     He brushed the question aside.  "Do you have any further information about the incident with Miss Stanhope this morning?"

     Surprise flickered across Kingsley's features for the briefest instant, and perhaps hurt at the shunning of his proffered solace, but then it was gone, replaced by bland aplomb.  "There was one observation of note," he said.

     Guilt crept into his joints like the nascent stirrings of crippling rheumatism.  Kingsley was only trying to help, ease the crushing burden others and his own lofty expectation had foisted upon him, but he could not accept it.  It was one thing to admit weakness and uncertainty to himself in the privacy of his office, but it was another to claim it in the presence of a comrade who, in the deepest places of his heart thought him invincible, unbreakable.  Aside from Harry, he was the ultimate symbol of Light, the bedrock that held the fragmented splinters of their world together, and he could not rob them of that feeble, misplaced hope.

     _An old man's vanity, _spat the voice of recrimination inside his head.  _Your refusal to cede to your mortal frailty has nothing to do with an altruistic desire to preserve the fraying fabric of your world and everything to do with the fact that you've grown sated and complacent in your position.  The praise and dewy-eyed adulation, that unreasoning faith, is as expected as your next breath, and you're afraid that if you let your carefully crafted mask slip, if you let him see, he'll raise the cry; the old god is weak and dying.  The fall from grace is hard and swift, and you know you would not survive it.  _

_     Why do you hold fast to these ridiculous illusions?  You're old, and your steps are faltering.  You doubt, and Shacklebolt sees through your flimsy silence.  He's too astute.  He might not know that your bladder is weak or that your eyes are failing, but he knows when you lie, and so do I._

     "Oh?"  He groped for his spectacles.

     "Yes, sir.  When I found her, she still had a quill beneath one hand, as if she had been writing something, but when I looked round the owlery, there was nothing."

     "Are you certain?"

     "Yes, sir.  I went back after I took her to the infirmary, just to be sure.  I even got on my hands and knees and sifted through the straw and the muck.  It wouldn't have done for other, less friendly Aurors to see something they oughtn't, but there wasn't a single scrap of parchment to be found."  Kingsley scratched a slender eyebrow.

     "Longbottom, then?"

     Kingsley nodded slowly.  "That's what I thought as well.  If he had anything, though, he made no mention of it."

     "No," Dumbledore murmured thoughtfully, "I don't expect he would."  He tapped his bottom lip.

     Kingsley's elegant brow furrowed.  "Headmaster?  With respect, sir, Longbottom is a good chap, but not the most cunning or forward-thinking."

     "_He_ isn't, no.  Miss Stanhope, however, is, and I've little doubt that she took the necessary precautions."

     _There's that word again-doubt.  Ever will it plague you._

     "Is there any possibility he would give it to the wrong hands?"

     "Of all the shortcomings possible to lay at his feet, cowardice and disloyalty are not among them, Kingsley.  Rest assured, the parchment is in good hands.  Rebecca does not place her trust lightly," Dumbledore said calmly, and a wry smile tickled the drawn corners of his mouth.

     Kingsley snorted.  "If at all.  She and Severus are two sides of the same coin in that regard."

     _So you've noticed? _Dumbledore thought, but he remained silent, one long-fingered hand toying idly with the handle of his sterling silver teaspoon.

     Kingsley rolled up the parchment in his lap and tucked it into the pocket of his robes.  "Shall I round up Longbottom, then?"  He rose from his chair.

     Dumbledore shook his head.  "No, no, I'll see about him.  If you were meant to have it, he would have told you, hysterical with worry or not, and I suspect that an Auror is the last person in whom he would place his trust.  Just see to it that the delightful Madam Umbridge is still none the wiser about Mr. Dawlish."

     Kingsley smirked and touched two fingers to the brim of his hat.  "With pleasure Headmaster.  Will there be a staff meeting this evening?"

     "No.  I've moved it to Tuesday."

     "Yes, Headmaster.  Good day to you, then."  

     "Good day, Kingsley."

     When the Auror had departed, leaving only silence and the lingering odor of his musky cologne, Dumbledore sighed and pulled Rebecca's letter toward himself again.  It remained unchanged.  The same spiky lines hoarded the same tantalizing riddles against a thin, parchment breast.  There was no revelatory thunderclap, no flash of divine inspiration.  Putting on his spectacles only served to bring to bring the blotchy pigment of the ink into sharp relief.  He drew a finger over the words, as though to coax their secrets from them with loving caresses, but they remained as enigmatic and indecipherable as before.

     Here and there, his eyes alighted upon the wavering shadow of a word, a fragment of the human tongue snared from the morass of cryptic, agonized scrawls.  _Jackson, _a name that might have been _Dinks_, and _Story_, which, for some inexplicable reason, had been capitalized.  There were other names, too, though he knew them to be such solely because they were capitalized.  Everything else was unreadable.  Each time he thought he had latched onto another piece of the puzzle, the letters shifted, tiny dunes of volcanic sand, until his eyes watered and stung, and he was forced to blink and turn his head.    

     He folded the parchment and tucked it inside his robes.  This bit of arcana was beyond him.  Fluent as he was in the myriad tongues of the world, this was a language he could not speak, a language meant only for the ears of God and the keeper of Rebecca Stanhope's secrets. He could stare at it all night; if he were persistent enough, he could separate the words from the random dribbles of ink and order them, and he would still be none the wiser because he knew nothing of the meanings beneath them, the subtle insinuations and allusions unique to every soul.

     _Severus would know.  He might not be fluent in Rebecca, but he's picked up more than most by virtue of constant close proximity.  He watched her even before unkind circumstance and stiff-necked pride threw them together, and she watched him.  I doubt more than a thousand civil words have passed between them, and yet, they understand one another.  They've begun to learn the language never spoken-the curl of lip, the narrowing of eyes, the affronted snap of starched wool.  They could never utter a word and have an entire conversation.  Ask him.  See what he knows._

     He rose from his chair.  Yes, it was time to intrude upon a private conversation, one that frightened and fascinated him by turns.  Severus would not divulge his secrets willingly or with good grace, and he would wound to protect his battered and cratered emotional territory.  Whatever duel he was waging with young Miss Stanhope, it was a private affair, and his interference, however well-intended, would rankle.

     _Of course it would.  His discourse with her is all that remains to him, the only thing that is left solely to his provenance.  And just like everything else, you will wrest it from him in the name of the greater good.  What will you tell him?  That it is in his best interest?  He's heard that before, and it's a rare occasion that it works to his benefit.  On the contrary, the invocation of that pithy phrase guarantees him an evening of humiliation and agony at Voldemort's feet.  And yours.  And it's still not enough.  Will it ever be?_

Unwelcome images rose in his mind of Severus, twenty years old and shivering on the floor of his office, weeping and spitting the drying blood from his teeth, gore-slick hands matted in the nap of the heavy Persian rug.  He had never seen so much blood on another person.  Slathered over his chin, soaking the greasy tips of his hair in a perverse dye.  The stench had been incredible, a slaughterhouse in high summer, and beneath that, the wet moss smell of fear and shame.

     _He came to you that night for help, for absolution, and you gave it to him, but not without price.  Never charity for its own sake, despite what the world thinks as it gazes into your beatific face.  Means to end, so long as you put a noble face on it.  He confessed everything between bouts of mortified retching, and in return for his unflinching honesty, you bound him to you in lifelong servitude, and then, oh, and then…_

     Bile rose in his throat.  He did not have time to stand here like a doddering fool, reminiscing over old sins and badly healed wounds.  He cleared his throat in a futile attempt to dislodge the sour knot of remorse there; it refused to leave, as did the ugly spate of memories that had spawned it.  He pressed his palm into the smooth mahogany of the desk, cool where his flesh was hot, and willed himself not to sink to his knees.

He should never have done it.  It was unconscionable, but he had been in the midst of war, and he had told himself that he had to be sure, had to know that it wasn't a ruse to cut him down.  Even now, he tried to justify it, though the dull cramp in the pit of his stomach belied the truth.  While Severus had been rocking and heaving, one crimson-gloved hand curling around the toes of his boots, he had reached into his mind, _raped _it.

     There was no other word for it.  He had simply pillaged the contents of Severus' tortured soul, pawed through black and festering memories of a hideous childhood and furious, lonely youth.  Nothing passed through his scouring, self-righteous fingers unscrutinized.  He saw it all, _felt _it all-the hours hiding in the wardrobe to escape the haunting sound of flesh on flesh that echoed throughout a silent house, the sizzling throb of overworked wrist tendons and the merciless press of a quill shaft against sweating fingers, the illicit heat of palm on tender flesh, the struggle to stifle his cheated, frustrated cries so his sniggering, sexually blessed Housemates would not hear.  Desire and swooning shame and brimstone vengeance as he took that which had never been freely given.  

And Severus, prostrate on the rug, had been powerless to stop him.  He could only watch, eyes glittering with impotent fury and deep mortification, as his deepest humiliations were lain bare for a Headmaster that had once traded his dignity for the sake of keeping the peace, watch and give voice to a guttural whine, a mortally wounded animal struggling against a throttling, slicing snare.  He had fought the intrusion for the briefest instant; his body arched and his eyes closed in fierce concentration, but he was too weak, too _tired, _and his groping Headmaster's fingers had crushed his feeble defenses like wet rice paper.

_     And even then, you felt the first shivering tendrils of shame.  Yes, he did a terrible, perverse, _monstrous_ thing; that will never be in doubt.  You saw it, and it sickened you.  Had it not been for your celebrated composure and grievously inflated sense of Headmasterly dignity, you would have joined him in retching.  But you saw things never meant for your eyes, things between him and his God.  You handled them as though they were mere trinkets, insignificant baubles for your careless perusal.  You extinguished your pangs of conscience by telling yourself that you were looking for evidence of trickery and Voldemort's ruthless designs, but you knew it for a lie.  After all, what did a lonely sixteen-year-old boy granting himself empty pleasures in the middle of the night have to do with the world, with the balance of the war?  Nothing.  Any more than the tears of an eight-year-old held the key to stopping the endless bloodshed.  You looked for no other reason than you could._

     Which is why, after you had plundered his mind, you knelt beside him and cast a Memory Charm.  You didn't want him to know the price you had exacted for your magnanimous forgiveness.  His eyes glazed, and he went still, and after a moment, the feral growl of agony, which had begun to subside into exhausted whimpers, flared anew, because for him, the horror was new.  He gave you a second confession as hysterical as the first, and when it was over, you held him like a child, felt his hot breath in your beard and his tears and mucus on your shoulder, and you never told him, nor did you purge his secrets.  You looked him in the eye every morning after, knowing each scar and sore behind that stoic façade, and you held them as collateral should he stray from the path you have set before him.

_     How history repeats itself._

He stiffened and straightened.  Poring over his past sins would achieve nothing.  He had done far too much of that in recent years, huddled before the fire, hoping that the dancing flames would warm aching bones chilled by more than biting winter frost and the inevitable erosion of age, a dotard clinging to the glories and hurts of yesteryear.  He wondered, sometimes, if he were succumbing to the cataract haze of senile dementia, but that thought was a dangerous one, and so he did not ponder it for long.  War loomed, and he would need to trust his instincts if there was to be any hope of survival.  Harry would need to trust them.  As would Severus.

     _Ah_, _but you don't_, crooned the voice in a mocking, jaunty singsong as he left his office and gave himself over to the grating, sliding darkness of the rotating staircase.  _You haven't since the Tri-Wizard Tournament, when you saw the man who had been Alastor Moody become Bartemius Crouch, Jr. at your feet.  Your faith was shaken then, shaken badly, and even now, you find yourself casting sidelong glances down the staff table, watching Moody sniff and prod his food as though it were a slumbering beast rather than mutton chops and asking yourself, _Is that truly my old friend, or have I been deceived again?__

_     Try as you might, the doubt creeps in.  You question whether it was wise to place Severus' fate in the hands of an untested fifteen-year-old girl who you cannot define.  You sense light in her, but there is also fathomless, remorseless darkness.  Each time you're certain you know which way the moral compass swings, the ground trembles beneath your feet, and sometimes you ponder whether she possesses a compass at all, and my, isn't _that_ a terrifying thought?  A person without compass is a person without leash.  _

     He blinked against the sudden flood of light as the stone gargoyle swung open to let him pass into the first-floor corridor.  It was deserted at this hour; most of the students were in afternoon lessons or barricaded in their Common Rooms, deep in study for O.W.L.S. or N.E.W.T.S.  The portraits that lined the walls murmured or inclined their heads in respectful greeting as he passed, and he returned their courtesy with an absent, upward curve of lip.  The gleaming suits of armor straightened to attention and saluted, the heavy, reverberating clang of their dropping visors resounding throughout the empty corridor.  There was a sussurating shuffle of feet from the Auror posted at the entrance to the dungeons, dry and brittle as the turning of old pages.

     Normally, he found such silence soothing, but now he wished for ruckus and clangor, for giggling first-years to scurry underfoot like eager, daring mice or careen around the corner with joyous abandon, for Peeves to unleash pandemonium with a well-placed Dung Bomb or water balloon, but the corridors remained silent and unoccupied, and Peeves, who paid heed to no one but the Bloody Baron, did not put in an appearance.

     He strode by the imperious Auror guarding the door, and his distracted mind dismissed the ill-concealed sneer of contempt on the young man's face.  Let him seethe all he liked.  This was still his castle, and it would be until he left it with hammertoes pointed heavenward.  A satisfied smile stole over his face at the thought, and he was humming when he reached the door to Severus' chambers.

     Snape was sitting on the couch when he heard the somnolent click of the tumbler, and for one paralyzing moment, he was sure that it was Fudge and his coterie of sharp-fingered lackeys, come to subject him to another round of invasive humiliation.  His body went rigid, and his wand hand groped compulsively for what it would not find.  His outraged sphincter clenched with old and painful memory, and his lips pulled from his teeth in a furious snarl.  If they thought they were going to subject him to that atrocity again, they were going to have to render him insensate first.  His hands curled into fists.

     "Severus?" came the voice from behind the opening door, and the bunched muscles of his shoulders relaxed with an audible creak.

     "Headmaster."

     Dumbledore's face peered around the door.  "Ah!  His eyes twinkled with pleased astonishment.  "Merlin, you're looking much better than when I saw you last!  Oh, indeed."  He closed the door behind him and came to stand before the sofa.

     "Once again, your penchant for gross hyperbole comes to the fore.  I did nothing more than shower, shave, and eat," he muttered.  Then, when the old man continued to gawp at him in frank appraisal, "Please, Headmaster, do sit down.  It will give you a better vantage point from which to simultaneously gawk and pat yourself on the back in nauseating self-congratulation."

     "Congratulation for what?" the Headmaster replied, just a trifle too coyly for his tastes, and sat in the chair opposite him.

     "Don't be coy, Headmaster.  Judging from the dewy eyes and obscene good cheer radiating from your pores like body odor, it is quite clear you think that last night's visit from that infuriating chit, Stanhope, is responsible for my improvement.  I assure you, you are very mistaken.  My apparent serenity of countenance stems from the fact that she is no longer here to dog my heels," he snarled, and tugged on the knees of his robes.

     Cotton wisp eyebrows rose in unison.  "I don't believe I made any mention whatsoever of young Miss Stanhope," he countered innocently, and removed his spectacles and began to polish them on the sleeve of his robes.

     Snape scowled and smothered a spate of obscenities by gritting his teeth.  Damn that man and his smug, sagacious countenance.  And curse his own fool's tongue for giving the game away.  Days cooped up in his chambers with naught to do but pace and stare at the walls and eat the food brought by his faithful house elf, Nibby, had made him careless.  He shuddered to think of the consequences had it been anyone but Albus in that chair.  Fudge, for instance.

     At the thought of his sanctimonious tormentor, anger bubbled in his chest and pulled his narrow shoulders into an unforgiving, rigid line.  If it was his last act of defiance in this world, he would see Cornelius Fudge suffer.  One hour for every minute, and a week for every hour he had spent locked in a sanctuary that had been perverted to the devices of his enemies.  Only fools thought vengeance should be commensurate with the misdeed, and Slytherins served their vengeance very cold indeed.

     _Fools and Albus Dumbledore, _he amended as he watched the Headmaster stroke the tip of his beard with supple, thoughtful fingers.  _According to Albus, there is no need for vengeance at all._

     He snorted.  Typical Gryffindor philosophy.  Turn the other cheek and let your enemies slap it raw.  Vengeance was petty and gauche, far beneath the dizzying heights of Gryffindor nobility.  Well, he would slither in the cooling mud of retribution like the serpent he was, sod what the rest of the world thought.  He had allowed his cheek to be turned aside too often in this life, first by the stinging, disciplinary hand of his father, and then by his allegiance to the man watching him with dancing blue eyes.  Not this time.  If it took until the end of his days, he would see Fudge fall, and laugh in his face.

     _The end of your days may be very soon, _pointed out the morbid voice of nihilism inside his head.  It sounded perversely gleeful.

     His fingers tightened over the pliant fabric of his robes.  If he had to wrest himself from the granite-fisted grips of the Aurors leading him to his execution and sink his teeth into Fudge's unsuspecting throat, then he would do it.  If wouldn't be the first time he had tasted the rich, lush warmth of blood on his tongue, and, truth be told, it was not altogether unpleasant.   

     "However," said Dumbledore as he perched his spectacles on the bridge of his nose again, "I must confess that I did come to speak with you about her."

     "My powers of prescience exceed those of Trelawney," he murmured.

     "There was an incident in the owlery this morning."

     The amusement curdled on his lips.  "An incident?"  

     The Headmaster nodded.  "She and Longbottom went to the owlery to conduct an unknown ritual, and she collapsed.  She is resting in the infirmary."  

     An image rose in his mind of the insufferable Stanhope child writhing and twitching in the squalid straw, flecks of spittle on her chin, suffocating beneath the crushing grip of uncontrollable muscle spasms.  Her thin, blue-tinged fingers scrabbled in the filth, bits of befouled straw beneath her nails.  Blue eyes rolled in their sockets, seeking respite that would not come.

     "Is she all right?" he said with more urgency than he had intended.  Then, "Idiot child.  What was she thinking, taking Longbottom, master of calamitous happenings?  I didn't think her a fool."

     "I do not know; she was unconscious and bloody when Kingsley carried her from the infirmary.  I will see to her in the morning.  If her condition were grave, Madam Pomfrey would have informed me at once."

     His body temperature plummeted, and his skin prickled with frozen nubs of gooseflesh.  His mouth was parched, and he was suddenly profoundly grateful that he was already seated.  Collapsing indecorously would have been another stinging blow to his battered pride.  He forced the rigid, uncooperative muscles of his jaw to open.

     "Unconscious and bloody?  Ritual?  What are you on about?  For Merlin's sake, what have you let her do?"

     The Headmaster smiled ruefully.  "Alas, Severus, as ever, I fear you give me far more credit than I deserve.  I have not let her do anything.  Indeed, I was unaware of her intentions until Kingsley told me what had happened."

     "Bollocks," he snarled.  "You're doing what you've always done-turning a blind eye to youthful depravity.  Permission by omission of prohibition.  You never gave her explicit consent, no, but you knew bloody well that she was stiff-necked enough to take such lunatic risks.  Quite convenient.  Succeed, and it was your dazzling Gryffindor brilliance; fail, and you can chalk it up to unquenchable juvenile hubris and absolve yourself of guilt.  You've done it with me, you've done it with Potter-," he spat the name as though it were an obscenity, "-and now you're doing it with Stanhope, waving me aloft as though I were a righteous cause worthy of a crusade."

     "That will do, Severus."  Though the Headmaster's voice was gentle, even casual, there was a hint of steel behind it.  _I will tolerate no more dissent, no more hot-blooded histrionics._

_     Sod you, Albus, _he thought venomously, and blood pounded in his temples and the tips of his fingers.

     He was delirious with a languid, dizzying fury.  His hands itched and quivered with the maddening desire to throttle, to strike.  He longed for the comforting heft of his wand against his trembling palm.  He wanted to hex and curse, to hear the tinkling shriek of shattering glass and the dull thud of splintering wood, a wet melon dropped on pavement.  He wanted to pour his vitriol into Dark magic and watch it explode in a hail of visible hatred, red and green, purple and sunburst yellow, a beautiful and lethal rainbow.

     He was accustomed to being a pawn, had _chosen _it as the term of his penance, atonement for sins for which there was no absolution and never would be.  He had known or at least guessed at the burden he would be asked to bear, and he had been well above the age of reason when he had made the decision.  It was a fair exchange; his worthless, sullied life for the one scrap of information that would bring the madness and the bloodshed to an end.

     This, however, was unconscionable, crass manipulation beyond even the Headmaster's previous heights of appalling hubris.  Stanhope was fifteen years old and fragile as thistle silk, for all her stymieing impertinence, and unlike Potter, her fate was not guided by a prophecy set down years ago by a half-mad Seer.  The Headmaster was using her to his own ends, manipulating her inexplicable affinity for him and her inveterate thirst for another challenge to overcome in order to buy him a few precious weeks or months of life, another chance to listen to the whisperings and plottings of a madman and feel his own urine cooling on his legs.  It was lunacy.  It was revolting.  It was absolutely Slytherin, and watching the venerable old Gryffindor beam beatifically in the darkness of the dungeons and speak of plausible deniability made him want to laugh and vomit at the same time.

     "I will not allow this, Headmaster.  I cannot.  I demand that you order her to stop immediately and turn her attentions to whatever meaningless drivel would normally occupy her days," he hissed, and rose from the couch.

     The Headmaster blinked, unperturbed by his outburst.  "I'm afraid that isn't possible," he answered matter-of-factly.

     Snape rounded on him.  "Then make it possible," he spat.  "Dammit, Albus, exercise some of that legendary power that has placed you upon your gilded ivory throne.  You've toppled one Dark wizard and bested another for nearly twenty years.  Surely it isn't beyond you to tame the will of a pubescent girl?"  He paced, heels clicking in the stone floor.

     The Headmaster's face hardened.  "Enough, Severus."  The serrated, warning tickle of a rapier against his ears.

     A frustrated, furious growl rumbled deep in his throat.  It was _not_ enough_.  _He had to make him understand.  He had been responsible for dozens of deaths, had washed his hands in untold rivers of blood, and a thousand more lives could be lain at his feet.  Guilt by association, and for seventeen years he had lived with that, even flourished in a twisted fashion.  He had not found peace, but his will to live and his pervasive, infectious guilt had reached an uneasy armistice.  He could not be responsible for another.  Not one more.

     _Not her, _whispered the unassailable voice of truth.  _It's not death to which you object, but _this _death.  If it were anyone else, save, perhaps, the man sitting across from you, you would bat nary an eye.  In the seventeen years since you fled His service, you have seen a hundred deaths-Muggles and wizard-and though your stomach churned, you never voiced any protest, never felt this rising tide of appalled outrage.  They were just another writhing body, and you found their plaintive, agonized gibbering irritating.  It stirred no pity in your breast.  So, let us be very clear.  A thousand deaths more could you stomach if it came to it; your need to cling to this life you have made for yourself is an addiction stronger than honor or obligation.  But not hers._

     He snorted.  Maudlin palaver, that.  There was nothing special about that infuriating, malformed sibyl.  He simply did not wish to live the rest of his days with the galling awareness that he was forever indebted to a student…a _Gryffindor _student.  He would not be her pity project, and he would not be hoisted as fodder for fruitless martyrdom.  She could die all she pleased, just not in his name.

     _Self-delusion does not become you.  _

     "I will say what I please; as you made so clear, I am no longer a professor under your auspices."

     "But you remain here at my leisure."

     "Ah," he purred, "the famed Gryffindor charity rears its head."

     Dumbledore sighed.  "I am tired, Severus.  I expressed myself badly.  Forgive me."  He removed his pointed hat and ran his fingers through his hair.

     "A maladroit tongue has never been numbered among your failings.  How convenient that it has manifested itself now," he murmured, and sat down again with a flourish of robe.

     "All that I meant was that, though you may not hold the title, you still have my respect and trust."

     "Then put an end to this foolishness," he snapped.  I cannot, _cannot_ abide that miserable stripling's death on my already overburdened conscience."  He stopped, horrified at the plaintive note in his voice.  Then, softer than the rustle of moldering silk, "I am not worth it."

     The Headmaster froze in the act of plucking a stray thread from his robes and gazed dispassionately at him.  "Worth?" he repeated blankly.  "Is that what this comes to?"  His face softened, and he smiled wistfully.  "Oh, dear boy, I fear that is not for you to determine.  Miss Stanhope disagrees.  As do I."

     "You're both barking."  He shifted on the sofa.  "I won't endanger her, Albus.  She is my student."

     "That, too, is beyond your control," the Headmaster said prosaically.  "She has made up her mind, and it is not easily swayed."

     "Intractable chit," he snarled.

     "Indeed."  He reached into his robes.  "Enlightening though your character assessment is, I came to ask if you could make sense of this."  He pulled out the folded piece of parchment.

     Snape plucked it from the Headmaster's outstretched fingers and opened it with an irritated snap of his wrist.  "Stanhope."  He squinted at the familiar scrawl.

     The Headmaster nodded.  "She wrote it in the infirmary.  Tonks delivered it to me a short while ago."

     He tore his gaze from the untidy, headache-inducing landscape of wobbles and squiggles.  "She's conscious, then?"  An invisible weight rolled off his chest.

     A curt nod.  "Awake and tight-lipped, according to young Nymphadora."

     "In other words, perfectly recovered," he retorted drily.  Despite the congenital biting sarcasm, he was light-headed with relief.

     "So it would appear."  The faintest hint of amusement crept into the Headmaster's voice, a fleeting glimpse of his customary jollity.  "Since the two of you were on relatively intimate-,"

     He scoffed.  "Intimate terms?  Merlin, Headmaster, she's an obdurate, willful pupil and an unwanted ally.  I am hardly conducting illicit liaisons down here, despite Minerva's most fervid, scandalized imaginings.  We hardly speak."

     The Headmaster was silent for a long moment.  "Words are not always necessary for understanding," he said quietly.

     "No," he conceded, but said no more.  There was nothing more to say.  

     Dumbledore pointed to the parchment.  "Now then, the parchment?"

     He narrowed his eyes, thin lips pursed in concentration as he pried words and sentences from the splatters of ink.  They were well-practiced in the art of deciphering Rebecca's slanted, erratic script, and though there were still long stretches of incomprehensible text, he could read far more than he had expected.  Interpreting it was a different matter.  It was as much an enigma as the mind that had conceived it.

     "What is it?  Arithmancy?  Has Vector looked at this?"  He tapped the poem with the ball of his thumb.

     The Headmaster nodded.  "Yes.  According to him, it is a hodgepodge Arithmancy, Runes, and Cryptology.  However, either in her haste or in her desire for secrecy, Miss Stanhope failed to assign specific Runes to the entities and events mentioned in the letter.  I had hoped you might be of some help in that regard."

     "I am not privy to the inner workings of Miss Stanhope's febrile little mind," he said, but he was already reading the poem again, searching for possible connections.  "Some of these are obvious-the serpent, for instance, and I can surmise that she fancies herself as the mongoose.  My brave defender."  He snorted.  "The princeling is Harry.  The wolves are most likely Aurors.  As to the rest, I cannot say.  'The pall that covers all' could be the Dark Lord, but she has no reason to refer to him.  Fudge, maybe."  A brusque, one-shouldered shrug.

     "I find the last line most interesting."  The Headmaster took the parchment and adjusted his spectacles.  "'The Messenger, harbinger of calamity,'" he read, and his voice filled the room.  "A harbinger, she called it.  Quite a specific word.  Unless she was prone to using it in everyday discourse?"  He cast a speculative glance over the top of his spectacles.

     "She never uttered it in my presence."

     Dumbledore steepled his fingers beneath his chin.  "I thought not."  There was a long, contemplative silence, and then he said, "Was there any warning, Severus, any at all?"

     "I have never had an accident in seventeen years," he snapped.  "I am not reckless with my pupils, and as much as I would love to wrap my fingers around Potter's neck until he turned a delectable shade of overripe pomegranate, I would never have given him a tainted or suspect draught.  I have sacrificed too much for this position to throw it away by poisoning that facile little ingrate.  I want the satisfaction of hearing the bones pop."

     Dumbledore nodded and patted his forearm.  "I expected no other answer, but it would have been remiss of me not to ask."

     Snape gave a noncommittal grunt.  He was too tired and beaten down to care about tact or Headmasterly obligation.  The question stung, salt rubbed into an open wound.

     "Any ideas as to the identity of the 'dark dauphin'?"  Dumbledore reached into his robes in search of the ubiquitous sherbet lemon.

     "None.  The girl speaks in riddles and tongues."  He reached up to knead his temples.  Looking at her scrawl had sown the seeds for a monstrous migraine.

     "Well, if her words are indecipherable to you, then we have little fear from the Aurors inspecting the post.  Clever girl."

     "I'm well aware that she is a Gryffindor, Headmaster," he muttered peevishly.  "Though I begin to wonder if the placement was truly merited, or if it was wishful thinking."

     "Oh?'

     He turned his head at that.  There was far less surprise at that pronouncement than there should have been.  He had sounded disappointed, as though he had just received confirmation of a dreadful suspicion.

     "Headmaster?"

     "You are not the first to voice such suspicions, Severus."  The sound of carob and sugar scraping tooth enamel.  "Where does she belong?  You see far more of her than I."

     "Not in Gryffindor."

     "Mmm."  _You know more than you wish to tell._

     "I have suspicions."  There.  That was all he was getting.

     _Oh, yes, you do.  You've turned it over in your mind for months, and each day the certainty grew, blossomed like poisoned honeysuckle.  You saw evidence in her bland, inscrutable face and the flat, reptilian gaze she cast at McGonagall whenever the woman drew breath in her presence.  She eschews Potter and all that goes with him, and the very concept of Gryffindor altruism pulls her lips into a mocking sneer.  She is not them, not a lion cub by half.  She is one of yours._

True as the statement rang in his internal ears, he denied it.  He was proud of his House, but he was also aware that it led its denizens down the left-hand path.  So long had it been associated with darkness and nefarious deeds that black myth had become blacker reality.  The name Slytherin had become an epithet as surely as Gryffindor had become a mark of honor, a happenstance happily abetted by the innumerable cries of, "I was Slytherin; I couldn't help it," voiced by the puling wretches that had neither the fortitude nor the honor to accept personal responsibility for their actions.  Being a member of Slytherin had become a crutch upon which they leaned, and because the public had come to expect it, they simply clucked and nodded sagely and never stopped to consider the thousands of Slytherins content to live and die without so much as a ripple in the societal fabric.  A hundred condemned a thousand, and if Stanhope belonged beneath the banner of the serpent, her fate was already sealed.

     _Cunning as the asp and tenacious as the badger.  What else could she be?  You see yourself in that wan, narrow face, and the Sorting Hat shrieked the name of Slytherin with an almost orgasmic surety when McGonagall placed it upon your head.  Only Draco Malfoy had faster placement.  She's your twisted little fetch.  The same bitterness, the same suppurating resentment, the same innate mistrust of everyone but herself.  Full of bile and venom and the tightly controlled longing to punish.  _

_     She is not one of mine.  She is not Pureblood! _he thought furiously, but that argument was fragile as straw in his grasping hand, crushed beneath the vivid memory of her in these very chambers last evening, frightened and dangerous as a cornered animal.

     _You would do well to keep that in mind.  That was a Slytherin face, the face of someone willing to shed any blood necessary to protect herself and what and who she considers dear.  You know as well as I do that had you not ordered her to drop her wand, she would have blasted Shacklebolt to bloody ribbons, consequences be damned.  She _wanted _to do it, and not all of her reasons were noble.  _

     _What about her honor, her determination to clear your name?  Hardly Slytherin qualities.  Most would have left you to your fate.  There is no profit in championing a former Death Eater, after all._

     He pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers in a futile attempt to stave off the encroaching, pulsating throb of his migraine.  For every thing he knew about her, there were a hundred he did not, and what he could see disturbed him just as much as what he could not.  She was neither Darkness nor Light, but an unrepentant, unreadable grey, and when she finally found her place among one side or the other, one man's great ally would become another's formidable foe.

     The same thought must have drifted through the Headmaster's mind, because he whispered, "What path does she walk, Severus?"

     His ears picked up the real question.  _Can I control her?_  He answered without hesitation.  "I don't know."  His prudent lips closed over the second half of the response.  _I don't think so._  A perverse part of him hoped he couldn't.  Being bound to someone, even beneath the yoke of kindness, stole part of an individual's intrinsic humanity, leached the colors from their life and left in their wake the dull, leaden grey of psychological indentured servitude, manacled every decision made thereafter to a hated promise.

     The Headmaster rose.  "Thank you, Severus.  I hope to know more once I have a word with young Mr. Longbottom.  In the meantime, rest assured that you are not forgotten.  I shall, of course, keep you abreast of any new developments, as well as Miss Stanhope's condition."

     Snape's brow furrowed.  "Longbottom?"

     "Yes.  Kingsley found a quill in Rebecca's hand in the owlery, but no parchment.  Whatever she wrote, we assume she gave it to Longbottom for safe-keeping."

     A rusty, derisive bark of laughter.  "Longbottom?  Foolish girl.  That boy would misplace his own genitalia during a bout of autoeroticism were in not firmly attached."

     "Thank you, Severus, for that _profoundly_ disturbing visual," Dumbledore said drily.  "I'm off to see Filius about a Memory Charm."  He crossed to the door and opened it a fraction.  "You're quite right, though.  Who would ever think to search poor, befuddled Mr. Longbottom for sensitive and potentially seditious documents?"  He drifted out with a final curt nod and closed the door behind him.

     Snape could only sit on his sofa, dumbstruck.  "Audacious chit," he managed at length, but beneath the seething affront were burgeoning tendrils of amazed admiration.  "Audacious chit."  He snorted.  Merlin in a girdle.

     While Snape and Dumbledore were picking fruitlessly at the threads that bound Rebecca's secrets, a letter addressed to Malfoy Manor departed the castle, clutched in the talons of a tawny barn owl.  It read simply:

_Lucius;_

     I have found something that may prove of great interest to a person of mutual acquaintance.  Its proper use could be quite profitable in future joint ventures.  Come to Hogwarts at your earliest convenience, as you must see it for yourself.


	45. Frog and Mongoose: The Liars' Cotillion...

Chapter Forty-Five

     They came for her at half-past seven the following evening.  She was huddled in a corner, fortified against the encroaching cold with her winter robes and a mug of hot cocoa.  Her Arithmancy book was open on her lap, and her quill was poised to make a notation in the cramped margin when the portrait swung open and Madam Toad and Dawlish glided inside.  The former was wearing her customary saccharine smile, her stubby fingers curled possessively around her ubiquitous clipboard.  She made a beeline for Rebecca.  Dawlish hovered in her wake like a terrified fly, careful not to draw too near, lest she open her broad, amphibious mouth and swallow him without a second thought.

     "Good evening, Rebecca," trilled Umbridge, and she bent so that her protuberant eyes were level with hers.

     Rebecca blinked once, then twice.  "Miss Umbridge, ma'am," she said slowly, and extended a cold, splay-fingered hand.

     Umbridge's smile faltered for the briefest instant, and behind her bland, polite gaze, Rebecca leered in vicious satisfaction.  So the old crone still remembered the feel of slick spittle on her fingers, did she?  Good.  Very good.  The more uncomfortable she was, the better.  She reached for her cocoa and took a long, indecorous, slurping sip while she waited for the woman to speak.

     Umbridge's lip puckered in a reflexive moue of disgust.  "Yes, dear, good to see you," she murmured faintly, and ignored the outstretched hand.  "Do you mind if I sit?  I thought we might chat."  She gestured airily at the overstuffed chair opposite Rebecca and seated herself without waiting for a response.  "Now then," she said briskly, and gazed at her in pleasant expectancy.

     Rebecca gazed sedately back at her, her fingers tracing lazy, palsied figure eights over the pages of her Arithmancy book.  If the old windbag thought she was going to fall for the tried and dismal motherly confidante routine, she was an idiot of the first order, and she was in for a very long night.  She was young, not stupid, and she had already seen what lay behind her mask of solicitous concern.  The bigoted old cow had refused to shake her hand for fear it was contaminated with an insidious diseases that devoured sinew and warped bone and left in its wake a helpless wastrel fit only for the charity and pity of her betters.  Even the most bovine could but interpret that gesture one way, and it was not an interpretation that lent itself to confidence.

     Umbridge cleared her throat.  "What are you studying, child?"  She craned her pudgy neck and peered at the book on her lap.

     Rebecca counted to ten before she answered, and all the while, her fingers continued their languid ballet over the grain of secret and potent magic.  "Arithmancy."  Pirouette and serpentine slither.

     "Oh?"  A strained, rubber-lipped smile from Madam Toad.  "How fascinating.  Do you enjoy it?"

     Another sip of hot cocoa.  "Yes, ma'am."

     Another protracted, awkward silence.  "Splendid, splendid," Umbridge said diffidently.  Her fingers drummed on the lumpy arm of the Common Room chair.  Her pained smile broadened in conspiratorial invitation.  _Tell me your secrets.  You can trust your Auntie Umbridge.  Pay no mind to the hands so industriously fashioning your Potions Master's noose._

     Rebecca returned the smile.  _Like hell, you transparent bitch._ 

     Umbridge's smile was predatory now.  "That's right, dear.  No need to be nervous.  I'm only here to listen."  She uttered a tinkling, disconcertingly girlish falsetto giggle.

     Rebecca's brow furrowed in ponderous concentration.  "You mean, like a friend?"

     Umbridge nodded, and her eyes flickered with malevolent triumph.  "Exactly."

     Rebecca brightened.  "Oh!  I'd like that.  The boys are nice enough, you know, but sometimes-," she leaned forward in her chair until the cover of her Arithmancy book dug painfully into her stomach, "it's nice to have a female perspective."

     "Of course it is, dear," cooed Umbridge, "and that's what I'm here for."

     "Really?"

     "Absolutely.  You can tell me the things you wouldn't dare tell anyone else."

     A mischievous grin tugged at the corners of her mouth.  "Well, there is one thing," she said earnestly.

     "Yes?" 

     "Well, it's, you see-," she stammered, and her cheeks blushed rose.

     "Come, come, child!  Don't be afraid."  Madam Toad was all but frothing in her impatience to wrest the secret from reticent lips, and in her haste, she had forgotten to inflect her words with the dulcet ring of maternal cajoling.  It was greedy, eager, cold, a spider coaxing a wary fly to take the first, lethal step onto its ensnaring gossamer web.

     "Well, all right."  She cupped her hand to the side of her mouth and leaned further forward, until her breath tickled the shell of Madam Toad's ear and her nose was inundated with the dizzying, faintly cloying smell of cheap lavender perfume.  This close, she could see her jowls quivering with anticipation.  "I think Seamus Finnegan has a fabulous ass," she said, and sat back, a winsome, _my-wasn't-that-a-wonderful-secret _grin plastered on her face.

     There was a thunderstruck silence, broken only by the furtive turning of pages and the sussurating scratch of quills on parchment.  Someone-a skittish first-year, perhaps-tittered, piercing in the stillness, and then the leaden silence descended again.  Madam Toad's face was an ugly, mottled purple, and her jaw unhinged with an audible creak.  She tried to speak, but all that emerged was a queer, gurgling rasp.  Her fingers convulsed around the pliant fabric of the chair, and in her eyes, Rebecca could see the Herculean struggle between the desire to bellow in cheated fury and the necessity of continuing the charade.  She stared at the spluttering woman in wide-eyed innocence.

     "Is everything all right?" she asked.

     _Did you really think I was so naïve, so starved for attention, old woman?  I have lived inside a fortress of my own making for as long as I can remember, and I can do so forever if it comes to it.  I was bred for solitude and secrecy, designed to thrive in the sequestered regimentation of the institution.  I could go a thousand days and never see the light of the sun.  And never think to miss it.  You'll have to do far, far better than that, and I don't think you can._

     "Ma'am?"  She shifted in her chair, and her fingers resumed their delicate caress of the pages, back and forth in laconic strokes, the twitching tail of a cat that knows its prey must come to it sooner or later. 

     Aside from the harsh wheeze of Umbridge's breathing, sound had ceased to exist in the Gryffindor Common Room.  Even the omnipresent skitter of Hermione Granger's parchment-devouring quill had stopped.  Everyone was watching.  Ron Weasley, who had shown interest in nothing save his shoelaces since his best friend's collapse, was goggling at Umbridge with diffuse, bruise-eyed curiosity.  Dennis Creevey was peeking surreptitiously over the top of his Transfigurations book, a marmoset that had scented danger on the wind.   

     Dawlish, who had sunk unobtrusively into the shadows upon arrival, emerged from the gloom, his wand gripped in one hand.  He started toward his superior, one hand raised as though to deliver a sharp blow between the shoulder blades.  "Do-Miss Umbridge?" he said sharply.

     _He's back now, _Rebecca thought suddenly as she watched the scene through half-lidded eyes.  _Not the sharpest tack in the drawer, and he never will be, but whatever was wrong with him the other night outside Professor's quarters has passed.  No more fugue, no more glazed pupils, no more jerky rictus grin, just mean animal cunning and the complete and unwavering knowledge of where his bread is buttered.  Such a stark contrast.  He was so strange, so wooden._

_     Like Pinocchio? _interjected her grandfather.

     _Yes, precisely like that.  Almost as if someone else had climbed into the driver's seat for a spell.  A marionette guided by a drunkard's hand._  As she watched him stride toward Umbridge with the cool precision of a military official, an incredulous suspicion  coalesced in her mind.

     There were ways of bending a person's will and reshaping a person's mind to serve whatever whim one chose.  They were neither just nor legal, but justice and legality had never been a requisite for existence.  Killing was not countenanced by the law, and yet it happened every day.  Stealing was forbidden, and yet every year, the governments under whose standard they gathered reached into their pockets and took a portion of their daily bread in tribute.  So it was not surprising in the least that those who forbad the usurpation of an individual's God-given will demonstrated little compunction in doing so themselves.

      Was it possible that Dumbledore, paragon of virtue, champion of free will, had resorted to such underhanded, amoral tactics as molding a man's will like so much potting clay?  A sardonic laugh tickled her throat, and she covered it by taking a sip of lukewarm cocoa.  Doubtless the sly old man would object; Gryffindors never wore hypocrisy well.  If she summoned the courage to broach the subject when next she saw him, he would offer her a sherbet lemon, pat her on the head as though she were an obstreperous puppy, and tell her that he was merely doing what was best for all concerned, but the platitude would not reach his eyes.  A game of semantics.  As if she cared.  Help was help, and if saving the good Professor meant crushing an Auror's self-determination, then so be it.

     It wasn't as if the Headmaster was the only one to ever entertain such sordid thoughts.  Countless men before him had done the same, and for lesser reasons.  Some of the more impatient orderlies in the D.A.I.M.S. hospital ward had employed them against stiff-necked pupil who refused to be herded into the showers or submit to the restraint and the needle.  Much easier to strip away the will of a shrieking, struggling cripple than waste time and energy reasoning with them or allaying their not unreasonable fear of the latest therapy du jour.  There was no screaming, no kicking and flailing, no bothersome moral quandary, just swish and flick and it was over.  The trembling, heretical prophet who had so brazenly espoused the radical doctrine of deciding for themselves when to bathe or whether or not to eat the lime Jello plopped haphazardly onto their cafeteria tray stepped dreamily into the shower or shoveled the jiggling concoction into their mouth without a whimper.  No fuss, no muss, and certainly more fiscally responsible, as it saved the hospital budget several thousand dollars per annum in sedatives and disposable syringes.  Legality was secondary to convenience and efficiency.  It was the American way.

     Before she could follow this line of conjecture further, Umbridge took a phlegmatic, gulping breath and spoke, hand pressed between her heaving bosom.  "Erm, my, well, that was an illuminating revelation, Rebecca," she managed.  "May I call you Rebecca?"

     Her tone was light, amused, but Rebecca could sense the festering, flailing fury just beneath the surface.  It was in the set of her jaw and the glint in her bulging eyes.  Things were clearly not proceeding as she had envisioned, and the desire to pick her up and shake her until the fragile bones of her neck rattled and popped fluttered beneath the pouchy flesh of her face.  Rebecca only blinked and smiled.

     "Well, dear?" Umbridge persisted, her voice rising.

     _No.  _"Of course, ma'am."  A lax smile.

     "Good, good."  Umbridge patted strands of flyaway hair back into place and heaved a sigh.  "Well, then."  She flashed a stiff, disingenuous smile.  "Where were we?"

     Rebecca smiled.  "I was telling you that I thought Seamus Finnegan had a spectacular ass."

  Dawlish, who was returning to the gloom from whence he had sprung, froze, and gazed at the top of his superior's head, waiting for the inevitable relapse of speechless frothing.

     Umbridge's knuckles whitened on the arms of her chair, and a muscle twitched in her eyelid.  "Yes, dear."  Kindness was an effort.  "I'm flattered by such confidence, really, but I was hoping to discuss matters a trifle more substantial."

     Rebecca's face fell.  "Oh.  All right.  But boys are important, aren't they?  I mean, we wouldn't be here without them.  Unless the nurses were lying about _that_, too," she mused thoughtfully, scratching her nose with drugged care.

     There was another flummoxed silence from her amphibious adversary, and from the corner of her eye, she saw that Dennis Creevey's nose had appeared over the dusty bookboard ridge of his textbook.  She bit the inside of her cheek to quash a smirk.

     _Easy, _warned her grandfather.  _Don't get too smart for your own good.  You're treading a fine line between ruse and brazen theatricality, and if she catches on, even for a moment, the jig is up.  Slow and simple, girl.  You're in a dance for a man's life, not a damn Oscar, and don't you ever forget it._

     The smirk withered. 

     "Now, Rebecca," began Umbridge, and she shifted in her seat.  "I was wondering if you'd like to tell me what happened in the owlery yesterday morning."  The motherly smile resurfaced, but her protuberant eyes were hard and calculating.

     _Ah, now we come to it.  I thought we might._

     She shrugged and scratched her head.  "I don't know ma'am.  I just went over funny.  The next thing I remember, I woke up in the Hospital Wing."

     "Funny?"  Umbridge pressed.  "Funny how?"  The smile stretched imperceptibly, and her nostrils flared.

     _Not funny haha, you dumb twat.  One, two, three, one, two, three.  _She pursed her lips in a show of careful contemplation.  "I don't know, ma'am.  I got dizzy, and everything went black.

     "I see."  She tapped her thumb on her clipboard.  "What were you doing up there?"

     _One, two, three.  Step.  Pivot. Step.  _

The dance had begun anew, and she was exhilarated and terrified, for they were not gliding gracefully across a gleaming parquet floor, but mincing and prancing across a glistening strand of spider silk, delicate as breath.  Each step could be their last, the one that sent them plunging into the abyss beneath their deft feet.  Hesitate too long, and she would fall; move too quickly, and the tightrope would become a noose.  There was no room for error, and the music beckoned her twitching, blue feet. 

     She smiled gormlessly at Umbridge and listened to the sibilant, rhythmic hiss of blood in her ears.  That smile was maddening, insulting, and she longed to close her eyes and shut it out, but she dared not show weakness, even for a moment.  She measured the passing of seconds by the pounding of her heart, and she waited.  She had all the time in the world.

     The tapping of Umbridge's thumb was a frenzied staccato.  "Well?"  Crisp.  Taut with rapidly fraying nerves.

     Rebecca furrowed her brow.  "Mmm?  Oh, I was visiting my owl."  _One, lunge, two, three._

"Your owl?" Umbridge repeated.

     "Yes, ma'am."  She gave a wobbly nod.  "Philo.  I wanted to see how he was doing.  He only has one leg, you know."

     That much was true.  Philoctetes-Philo, for short-was a one-legged, Trans-Atlantic owl.  The shopkeeper in Hogsmeade had tried to dissuade her from buying him, saying he was lame and intractable and quite obviously useless, and offering to show her faster, stronger, younger owls.  It had never occurred to him, bless and damn him, that such an unflattering assessment might offend a crippled, surly patron who had been called the same for as long as she could remember, and only when she asked him if he thought her lame and useless did he desist.  In the end, his cavalier dismissal of the owl had only served to whet her appetite, and twenty minutes later, she had left the shop with an iron cage containing Philo, who had hooted and puffed his feathers as if to say, _So long, asshole._ 

     She smiled at the memory.

     "You didn't go there to write a letter?"

     She shook her head.  "No, ma'am."

     The tapping ceased.  "Are you certain, dear?"

     Behind her relaxed façade, Rebecca's stomach dropped to her knees.  Umbridge was far too smug for her comfort; in the flickering firelight, the treacle smile was a lupine leer. 

     _One, two, three.  The dance has grown more intricate now, the steps more exact.  Round and round we go; where we stop, no one knows.  No more lazy minuet.  We're in a foxtrot, and the tempo will go faster still by the time the music fades.  Will we rumba?  Tango?  I think so.  Before all is said and done, you and I will jitterbug and Charleston until one of us falters, and I promise you that it won't be me._

     She nodded.  "Yes, ma'am, I am."  _Step._

     "So the quill that was found under your hand wasn't yours?"  A belladonna purr.

     Her stomach abandoned her knees in favor of the matchstick confines of her ankles.  Guilt over her dark contemplations while in the seductive sway of the Story and the opiate addiction of forbidden Arithmancy had clouded many of the details of the incident in the owlery, and she had forgotten about the quill.  There was no question of denying ownership or claiming she had found it there.  She was, insofar as she knew, the only student at the school who used Dicta-Quills.  She took a deep breath and counted to ten before she responded.

     "Yes, ma'am, it was."  Her jaw throbbed with the effort of keeping her dazed, muddled expression in place.

     "But you said you didn't go there to write a letter," Umbridge countered, and her voice held the slightest tinge of irritation.

     "Yes, ma'am.  And I didn't."

     "Then why was the quill under your hand?"  She was so eager that she was leaning forward in her chair, and her hands were folded tightly in front of her, opening and closing in eerie approximation of a heartbeat.

     She blinked and forced herself to remain silent and still.  Haste now would be catastrophic.  "I wasn't.  I-,"

     "She was letting me borrow it, ma'am."  Neville's small, nigh-inaudible voice was deafening in the watchful, sepulchral silence of the Common Room.

_     Thank you, God, for the Gryffindor in Neville Longbottom.  If I ever get elected as Grande Dame of Wizarding Britain, I'm throwing him a parade and marching the brass band right down the main thoroughfare.  _She willed her shoulders not to sag with profound relief.

     Umbridge rounded on him, furious that her moment had been snatched away.  "And who might you be?" she snarled, and there was nothing sweet about it now.  It was the savage, guttural growl of a wolf whose kill had been pried from its jaws.  Rebecca flinched.

     Neville turned the color of blanched whey, but he put down his Herbology book, rose from the sofa, and folded his hands behind his back.  "Neville Longbottom, ma'am," he said quietly, and though his voice quavered, his rounded chin jutted in unconscious defiance.  "I was with her in the owlery."

     "Were you, indeed?"  Umbridge's eyelids drooped speculatively, and she twisted a pewter signet ring on the second finger of her right hand in a laborious circle.

     Neville swallowed with an audible gulp and shuffled his feet, but he held his ground, and his gaze did not waver.  "Yes, ma'am."

     _Oh, yes, a parade down the main thoroughfare and an edict declaring that all firstborn sons shall be called Neville.  _Rebecca shoved her hands into the concealing folds of her robes and crossed her fingers.

     "Splendid!  Then perhaps _you_ will be able to shed some light on what happened."  Umbridge clapped her squat hands together.  "Why did she lend you her quill?" she demanded.

     Blanched whey was giving way to sun-dried grout.  "Because I wanted to write something down before I forgot.  I have a dreadful memory, ma'am."

     "And she just happened to have a quill?" Umbridge sniffed.

     Neville blinked.  "Yes.  It's good to have one on hand in case you need it."  Perspiration beaded on his upper lip and glistened in his hairline.  Rebecca added Neville Longbottom Day to the list of decrees to be passed once she was in office.

     A toothy, malevolent smile from Umbridge.  "Where was your quill, then, since you are so clearly an advocate of preparedness?" 

     Rebecca wished for the hand of God to strike the woman dead where she sat, but she didn't keel over in a macabre reminder of the power and fury of God.  In fact, she rose and took three stumping strides toward Neville.

     Neville retreated half a step, but then his face hardened, and he stayed his foot.  His hands balled into fists at his side.  "I didn't have one.  I told you, ma'am, my memory is atrocious.  Professor Snape says I'd forget my own head if it weren't screwed on, and he's right.  Even my Gran thinks so.  She sends me three Remembralls every term, and I manage to lose every blasted one.  You can ask her if you like." 

     He was trembling with fear and his own unprecedented audacity, but his eyes were blazing inside his face, and his shoulders had shrugged off their defeated slump.  He was straight and proud, and though the difference was no more than half an inch, Rebecca would have sworn it was a foot.

     "Oh, I shall, Mr. Longbottom," Umbridge murmured.  She was looming over him, her beefy jowls casting a diseased shadow over him in the dancing firelight.  "I'll be speaking with you later, Mr. Longbottom, after I search Miss Stanhope's possessions."

     "Search my possessions?" she blurted before prudence could stay her tongue.

     "Why, yes," Umbridge murmured, turning her salted sugar leer on Rebecca once more.  "You don't mind, do you, dear?"

     She made no answer, but she most certainly did mind.  Umbridge and her boot-licking toady had no right to paw through her things like so much bric-a-brac, upend her drawers, riffle her rucksack, and sneer at her tatty underwear while Winky cowered in the corner and tugged fretfully on her leathery ears.  They were bits of her life, however insignificant, and they had already been inspected and dissected with clinical efficiency.  No sordid plot had been uncovered, no nefarious machinations discovered in the thread of her quilt.  Everything had been found innocent, and everything was as it had been on the night of the first inspection, down to the crease in her coverlet.

     Except for the silver and jade serpent pin stuffed into a pair of socks at the bottom of her trunk.

     The Head of House pin entrusted to her by the Headmaster was hidden in a pair of knobbly, iridescent pink socks.  The very thought of putting such a precious object into such an ignominious hiding place appalled her, and the guilt still gnawed at her bones, but she had seen no alternative, and she had assuaged her constant, nascent shame by clutching it in her hand in the dark watches of the night, fondling the jade eyes and the tiny, pointed fangs and watching the doubts and terrible suppositions of her heart cavort in the heavy folds of the hangings around her bed.  It was her talisman against the nightmares, and she gripped it until her knuckles throbbed and her palm was sticky with sweat.  When her eyelids grew heavy with sleep, she slipped it beneath her pillow, and in the morning, it was returned to its woolly nest beneath her bras and socks.

     Her palm tingled with the phantom weight of it, and she rubbed it against her robes to quell the sensation.

     "No, ma'am," she heard herself say, "I don't mind."  Faint and far away.

     "No, I thought not," Umbridge said, and she strode to the stairs that led to the girls'dormitory.  When Dawlish did not immediately follow suit, she scowled and cleared her throat.  "Why are you still standing there, Mr. Dawlish?  We have work to do," she said impatiently.

     Dawlish started and shook himself, as though he were emerging from a deep fugue.  "Mm?" he croaked groggily, and then, more sharply, "Oh, yes, ma'am.  Sorry.  Afraid I was woolgathering," he muttered, and hurried to join her.

     _I'll just bet you were, _Rebecca thought wryly, but she was too tired and too terrified to dwell on it for long, and her shoulders drooped with an audible pop of tendon.  As soon as Umbridge and her faithful, wand-waving crony reached the top of the stairs, all her subterfuge and carefully laid plans would disintegrate like spun sugar.  A spike of pain plunged into the base of her spine, and only the surety that she would vomit if she opened her mouth kept her from crying out.  The dance was about to come to a grossly premature end.

     Umbridge tutted and shot him a scathing glare.  "Indeed," she huffed.

     She had one foot on the bottommost riser when the portrait hole swung open and the Headmaster entered, seconded by McGonagall.   

     "Ah, good evening, Miss Stanhope.  You're looking much better.  Did you have a restful night in the infirmary?"  He beamed at her.

     She nodded.  "Yes, sir."  No point in bemoaning the abysmal, concrete slabs that served as infirmary beds at this late date.  "Good evening, Professor McGonagall."  _Come to see for yourself that I haven't been reduced to ash and lamentation?_  She fought not to roll her eyes.

     McGonagall gave a curt nod.  "Good evening, Miss Stanhope."  Her sharp eyes appraised her, looking, no doubt, for signs of imminent relapse, and finding none, drifted over the other occupants of the room in a silent head count.  Her lips thinned when she caught sight of Neville, pale as milk and swaying drunkenly on his feet.  "Mr. Longbottom, what in Merlin's name is wrong?  Are you ill?"  She started forward.

     Neville made an incoherent mewling sound, and his eyes darted to the stairs to the girls' dormitory, where Umbridge was still poised like a gone-to-seed sprinter waiting for the strident _pop_ of the starter's gun.  Both professors followed his gaze, and McGonagall's eyes narrowed.  The Headmaster's genial smile faltered, and he pushed his spectacles onto the bridge of his nose.

     "Ah, Dolores," the Headmaster called jovially, "what a surprise to see you here.  Were you looking in on young Miss Stanhope as well?"  His blue eyes twinkled, but beneath the merriment was the cold glint of calculation.  Rebecca could almost see the fine gears of his mind clacking furiously, linking the unseen threads of coincidence and probability.  His eyes flickered from Umbridge to Neville to Rebecca to the rest of the Common Room and back again.

     "Headmaster Dumbledore."  Umbridge removed her foot from the riser, and Rebecca was momentarily dizzy with relief.  "How unexpected.  Yes, I had come to call on Miss Stanhope.  One of the Aurors informed me of her mishap this morning."  She turned to Dawlish.  "Go along, Mr. Dawlish."  Dawlish started up the stairs.

     "And where do you think you're going?" McGonagall called shrilly.

     "I-we-," Dawlish mumbled, and gestured vaguely at the top of the stairs.

     "I thought he might have a look around Miss Stanhope's things," Umbridge offered smoothly, but there was a hint of challenge in her voice.

     McGonagall's eyes narrowed even further, as if to say, _We'll see about _that, and she fisted her hands on the bony jut of her hips.  "What on earth for?  You've already turned this entire dormitory inside out and found absolutely nothing.  Surely you don't think she had anything to do with Potter's collapse?"  She fixed Umbridge with a baleful, accusatory stare.  Dawlish ventured another hesitant step up the stairs, and she turned her escalating temper on him.  "Not another step.  Not one."  She jabbed a finger at him.  "It'll be a sorry day indeed when I countenance a man pawing through a young lady's delicates."

     Rebecca bit her tongue against an incredulous howl of laughter.  Her underwear had been called many things, but delicate had never been one of them, and the hard evidence of her Head's suspected prudery on the heels of such cloak and dagger tension struck her as surreal.

     _The Forces of Evil thwarted by the stodgy Victorian mores of my Head of House.  _She nearly suffocated on another guffaw.

     "Really, Dolores, I must agree with Professor McGonagall," Dumbledore said mildly.  "The Gryffindor Common Room and dormitories have already been searched most thoroughly, and I see no reason to cause such disquiet and upheaval again.  It has proven most upsetting to the Slytherins, who, I'm sure you'll agree, have been through a very trying ordeal in recent weeks."

     "I was merely trying to ascertain whether or not Miss Stanhope was inadvertently in possession of something that might bring her harm," Umbridge countered a trifle petulantly.  "Perhaps one of her Housemates gave her a toxic plant or a jinxed sweet in a bit of malicious sport.  She would hardly know any better, the poor, sheltered dear."  The false sweetness in her voice was sickening, and Rebecca's stomach lurched. 

     Rebecca wished a pox upon her head, but said nothing.  It was, after all, exactly what she wanted-_needed-_the overbearing battleaxe to think.  She rolled to Neville and patted him on the back.  "Why don't you sit down, Neville?  You look a bit peaked."

     Neville goggled at her in dull incomprehension for a moment before the fog lifted.  He nodded.  "Right.  I think I will."  He tottered to the nearest sofa and sank onto it with a grateful sigh.  She followed him and parked herself alongside him.

     "The Slytherins," Umbridge continued, and now there was no trace of even feigned sympathy in her voice, "were under the auspices of Snape.  That and the heretofore documented propensities of a number of their parents, therefore, makes it reasonable to treat them as suspects." 

     "While I most appreciate your concern for young Miss Stanhope's well-being, I should think it would have proven more helpful and illuminating had you simply gone to the infirmary and asked to see Madam Pomfrey's account of the affair.  She is an excellent Mediwitch and keeps meticulous records.  You could have spared yourself and my students a great deal of time and stress, and I'm sure the Ministry is anxious to ensure that their investigation causes no undue distress."  Dumbledore paused.  "It is entirely possible that Miss Stanhope's blackout was not precipitated by _youthful _malfeasance.  She is undoubtedly unaccustomed to such disruptions to her daily routine."  He turned his beneficent gaze on Rebecca.

     She bristled at being painted as a fragile wallflower unable to cope with life's unforeseen exigencies, but she knew a prompt when she heard one.  "Well, sir," she said, modulating her voice into shamed, reluctant confession, "it has been quite hard for me; I'm far from home, I don't seem to fit in, one of my Housemates has fallen ill, one of my professors is under suspicion, and everywhere I turn, Aurors walk the halls and dissect my every twitch for an ulterior motive.  It's daunting."

     "There.  You see?  Nothing sinister about that." 

     There was an incredulous snort from Seamus, who wisely kept his nose buried in his Defense Against the Dark Arts book, and who thus missed the look of molten indignation McGonagall spared him over the rims of her spectacles.  Dumbledore ignored it and continued to gaze at Umbridge with an air of sedate authority.

     "No, indeed," he went on almost cheerfully, "I think it a rather understandable reaction, all things considered, and much more plausible than a poisoning or the burden of a dark and terrible secret hidden from governmental authorities, don't you think?  "After all, she is hardly the only one in the room to look a trifle worse for wear."  As if to prove the point, Neville emitted a silent but very sour belch.  

     Umbridge merely glared at him.

     "As for your assessment of the Slytherins, I'm afraid I cannot agree," he said, and the gently needling merriment was replaced by sudden solemnity.  "They are doing their best to find their way, and as such, it is in the best interest of all concerned to treat them no differently than the other Houses."

     An incredulous sniff from Umbridge.  Nor was she the only one.  In his chair beside the hearth, Ron Weasley was nearly apoplectic with disbelief.  His eyes bulged from their haggard, puffy sockets, and only Hermione Granger's soothing, restraining hand on his forearm prevented a histrionic verbal essay on Why All Slytherins Are Evil:  A Treatise on Vengeful Hysteria in Three Parts, Or, Why There Is a Special Circle of Hell Reserved for Professor Snape.  As it was, his clawed fingers were digging divots in the lumpy upholstery of his chair.

     Umbridge drew herself up.  "Your sentimentality is commendable, Headmaster, if ill-advised," she said stiffly.  "I assure you, the Ministry has things well in hand."

     "Indeed," the Headmaster responded drily.

     "Now, if you don't mind, I shall proceed with the search of Miss Stanhope's belongings."

     "I thought we had established that I very much _do_ mind, Dolores," McGonagall spat.  "There's no reason for it, and I'll not have you harassing one of my Gryffindors."  All civility had been dispatched in favor of ill-concealed contempt.

     Rebecca stared at her Head of House.  _One of my Gryffindors.  _Inclusion rather than tacit, well-intended exclusion.  Not "the cripple" or "the helpless child".  Just simple recognition of status.  _One of my Gryffindors._  The phrase echoed inside her head with a divine resonance, and though she still thought the woman an overbearing prude with a nauseating martyr complex, the first diffuse stirrings of respect kindled within her.  A prude McGonagall may be, but she was a prude with the untarnished brass to tell Madam Toad to catch the next handcart to Hades.

     _Gryffindor to the marrow, _she thought, and alongside the familiar contempt was a grudging admiration.

     "I am well within my rights to search, your objections notwithstanding," Umbridge snapped officiously.

     "Indeed," Dumbledore conceded.  "However, _my_ objections carry a bit more weight, and I agree with Professor McGonagall.  I will not permit an unfounded search."

     Umbridge flushed an unbecoming purple.  "Of course you do.  Why shouldn't you?  Everyone knows-," she began.

     "Enough."  His voice was soft, but the command was as abrupt and decisive as a thunderclap.  Slouching students straightened in their chairs, eyes widening and fingers clutching textbooks their minds had long since forsaken, antelopes scenting blood on the wind.

     Umbridge must have sensed it, too, because her face softened, and she raised her plump hands in a conciliatory gesture.  "Forgive me, Headmaster.  I did not mean to speak out of turn.  I am tired," she simpered, and offered him an ingratiating smile.  The Headmaster appeared unimpressed.  "You do understand that I will be going to Cornelius with this matter?" 

     "Quite.  But until the Minister informs me otherwise, Miss Stanhope and the other students-including those of Slytherin House-are to be left alone.  Is that clear?"

     Umbridge's expression soured.  "Exceptionally, Headmaster Dumbledore," she muttered.  She spared Dawlish a surly, put-upon glower as she turned toward the entrance to the Common Room.  "You will be hearing from the office of the Minister shortly," she told Dumbledore as she stalked away.

     "Of that I have no doubt," he said, almost too low to be heard.  He watched her until she disappeared from view and the portrait swung shut behind her.  He stood for a moment, his lips pursed in pensive contemplation, and then he and said, "Are you all right, Miss Stanhope?"

     She started.  "Oh, yes, sir.  Forgive me.  I was lost in thought."  She ran her fingers through her hair and stole a furtive glance at the portrait hole.  Her escape had been a narrow one.

     As though he could read her thoughts, he offered her a wan smile.  "I'm afraid Miss Umbridge will make good on her promise to go to the Minister, which means that a search is inevitable.  I trust you have nothing that would pique their undue interest?"  He arched an eyebrow in inquiry. 

     She shook her head.  "No, sir."  She had heard the unspoken corollary to his query.  _If you do, for Merlin's sake, make sure it cannot be found._

     He smiled and rested his warm, dry hand on her shoulder for a moment.  "I thought not."  He let his gaze drift to Neville, who was slowly regaining his color and equilibrium now that Madam Toad and her henchman had departed.  "Ah, Mr. Longbottom, I was told you had something you wished to show me."

     Neville looked at him blankly.  "No, si-," he began.

     Rebecca coughed and gave him a sharp jab in the tricep with her bony elbow. 

     "Ouch," he muttered, and rubbed at the stinging flesh.  He opened his mouth to remonstrate, but sudden realization dawned, and he snapped his fingers.  "Oh, wait!" he exclaimed.  "Yes, sir, I do."  He leaped to his feet and scurried up the stairs to the boys' dormitory, and Rebecca noted that McGonagall followed his ascent with a mournful gaze.  Before she could ponder the reason for such an odd, maudlin expression to cross her Head's face, Dumbledore spoke.

     "Before I forget, Miss Stanhope, have you managed to make sense of the spells Professor Flitwick gave you?"  His eyes twinkled with knowing amusement.

     "Yes, sir.  I'm sure they will prove most useful.  Thank you."  Her lips curved in a secretive smile at the thought of the pair of spells the parchment had contained.  The parchment itself was ash and smoldering memory, offered up to the Common Room fireplace as soon as she had committed its contents to memory.

     She had no doubt that they would be invaluable.  The first was the Disillusionment Charm the Headmaster had performed on her in his office.  The second was the Incantatem Obscuri Charm, designed to conceal the evidence of spellcasting.  Properly done, the wand on which it was performed could cast spells without detection for a short time.  Because of its potential for abuse, it was classified as Restricted Magic, for use only by Aurors and Ministry Hit Wizards, which meant that every Dark Wizard worthy of the title and every two-bit shade who longed to earn it knew how to cast it.

     "Splendid.  You have already seen a demonstration of the first, have you not?" he asked.

     "Yes, sir, but the second-,"

     "The second," he interrupted kindly, "can be done by Professors Flitwick or Moody."

     She goggled at him.  "Professor _Flitwick_?"

     The Headmaster chuckled.  "He wasn't always a professor, Miss Stanhope."

     Apparently not.  The image of Professor Flitwick skulking through a shadowy hedgerow in pursuit of nefarious enemies of the state danced in her head.  "Yes, sir."  She giggled.

     Neville's footsteps sounded on the stairs, and a moment later he appeared, a ball of crumpled parchment in one hand.  "Here you are, sir," he said breathlessly, and he thrust the wadded paper at the Headmaster.

     "Thank you, Mr. Longbottom."  He deftly extricated it from sweaty, clutching fingers.

     "You're welcome, Headmaster."  He sounded perversely proud, and Rebecca felt a twinge of affection as he swiped his forearm across his forehead.

     "Good evening, Miss Stanhope.  Sleep well."  The Headmaster inclined his head in farewell.

     "Good evening, Miss Stanhope, good evening, Gryffindors," McGonagall said crisply, and then she and the Headmaster headed for the portrait hole, McGonagall marching in the wake of the Headmaster's beatific glide like a disgruntled heron.

     "Good evening, Professors," came the dutiful chorus as they departed.  One by one, heads dropped to books or turned to study the flickering flames.

     When they were gone, Rebecca turned to Neville.  "Neville Longbottom, you are absolutely brilliant, and don't you ever let anyone tell you differently, not even your Gran.  Do you hear me?"

     He gaped at her.  "What?"

     "You heard me."

     "I did; I just don't believe it."  He poked his pinky into one ear and jiggled it furiously, as if he suspected some auditory malfunction that sent impossible messages to his disbelieving ears.  When she continued to stare at him, he shuffled his feet.  "Erm, all right.  Thanks," he muttered, and averted his gaze.  A deep crimson flush stained his neck and cheeks.

     Without another word, she spun her chair around and went upstairs to pay homage to the serpent with glittering jade eyes.


	46. And All These Things I Carry

Chapter Forty-Six

Hogsmeade, it was said, had been established as a haven against Muggle persecution. Its ground had been seeded with the sweat of terrified wizards fleeing the Muggle torch and pitchfork, and the air had resonated with the keening wails of frightened infants too young to understand the need for silence. The cobblestones that paved its ramshackle, winding streets had been prised from the earth by desperate, raw, bloody hands, and the darker, truer legends held that the cornerstone of each thatched hut and crude stone cottage had been soaked in the blood of a willing sacrifice. Death to ensure life.

Here in this sleepy hamlet, not yet burdened by the looming, sentinel shadow of Hogwarts, the people of Hogsmeade had fashioned lives for themselves, wrested it by force of will from the grudging soil and the boggy lochs. They farmed and wove and hunted. They nourished their children by the toil of their hands, and because many of them still bore the horror of their former lives upon their backs or in their eyes, they did not speak of what had gone before. Better that their sons and daughters never know how dark the night could become.

If any curious child ventured to ask about the wards around the village or the puckered, white lines on their father's flesh that danced in the candlelight, they were told that monsters lurked beyond the sure protection of magical walls. If they persisted, they earned a slap or a night without supper. Most learned not to ask, and after a while, the matter ceased to trouble them.

And so the knowledge and the memory slipped away, replaced by the complacency of those who have wanted for nothing. The warnings of the aged went unheeded, and the young ventured beyond the safety of their borders to mingle with Muggles, take up friendly discourse with those who had hunted their forefathers with pitchfork and torch and spear. The slavering monsters of old had been supplanted by the congenial face of the textile merchant or the buxom sensuality of the fair village maiden. Enemy became uneasy comrade, though the wizards never grew so foolhardy as to divulge their secrets. Muggle superstitions died hard, and even the thickest or randiest of wizard kind could still see the evil eye or the forked finger if they knew where to look.

The wards remained in place, though the village people told themselves that they were a matter of convenience rather than necessity. After all, it was much easier to conceal magic from prying eyes behind the wards; one need not fear a slip of the tongue or the unwitting magic of the toddler if there were no eyes to see. The shimmering walls became a conceit, a crowning achievement, and the village they surrounded was no longer an enclave of wizards cowering from their vicious, bloodthirsty Muggle neighbors, but a utopia of like-minded souls who simply wished to live unmolested by the outside world.

Whatever it was or had once been, Lucius Malfoy despised it, and he pinched the mink of his traveling cloak between his fingers so as not to befoul it with the dust of these accursed streets. With its gaudy shops and bovine, glassy-eyed peddlers, it was anathema, the very antithesis of everything for which he stood. Here on these filthy, cobblestone streets, wizardry defiled itself in the name of the almighty Galleon. Greedy shopkeepers made no distinction between Muggle-born and Pureblood and took their coin with equal avarice, never mind that the lucre of the latter was crawling with weakness and disease. How any respectable wizard could stand to touch a Mudblood, he could not imagine.

_That's just it, _sneered the cold, urbane voice of his long-dead father, a voice which often dissolved into the glottal, gelid-tar hiss of the Dark Lord. _They're not respectable. Oh, they put on their airs and pretensions, and they wield their wand as if they were as entitled to it as you are I, but beneath the silk and the lace and the sickly-sweet smell of cosmetic powder, they're as vile as the Muggles they adore and pity by turns. They have neither scruples nor honor. Some-even Purebloods unworthy of they air they breathe-have _lain _with them. But they pay the price, don't they? They always do in the end; even those who think justice has passed them by. It hasn't forgotten. It has only been delayed, and, in truth, the temporary stay will only make the gratification all the sweeter, will it not…boy?_

He flinched and gritted his teeth. Boy. He loathed that epithet almost as much as he hated the Mudbloods and Muggles who undermined his kind with their very existence. Such an innocuous word on its own, devoid of either malice or benediction, but in his father's mouth, that single syllable had been perverted into an obscenity, a searing, lashing knout that had stripped him of his treasured dignity and reduced him to a pouting child who could not meet his sire's unflinching, grey gaze. Boy. Hard and pitiless as a slap and dripping with ridicule and condescension.

How many times had he sat at the family table at Malfoy Manor and listened to his father rail against the steady decay of his world between forkfuls of caviar and ludicrously expensive pate? A hundred? A thousand. By the time he was five, he had lost count, and he was sure that the tirades had been going on long before he was seed in his father's loins or an unsightly swelling inside his mother's stomach. He had not been subjected to one of his progenitor's charming homilies in twenty years, but he could still recall the glint of light off highly polished silver as he jabbed his fork into the air for emphasis and the resonant thump of his aristocratic fist upon the table when passion overthrew propriety.

_"They'll be the ruin of us all, do you hear me, boy?" _Thump._ Wine from an overturned goblet staining the white linen a glistening crimson._

_ "Yes, Father." Head down, eyes fastened on the untouched mutton on his plate. His appetite quashed by the venomous belligerence in that voice. His pubescent voice cracking under the weight of adolescent hormones._

_ "Yes, Father." Cruel, uncanny mimicry. "Weak; you're weak. The taint of your mother's blood. Sometimes I wonder if you're mine at all. Perhaps you are a changeling, sent by the artifice of family enemies to bring down the House of Malfoy." A beady, speculative stare. "Or maybe your mother was simply a trollop unable to keep her knees together. Merlin knows she parted them for me quickly enough."_

A throbbing ache in his knuckles jolted him from his reverie, and he glanced down to see his fingers fisted around the polished shaft of his serpent-headed walking stick. The fine oak creaked and trembled in his grip, and he forced it to relax. The old tyrant was moldering in his well-deserved tomb in the Malfoy crypt in Wiltshire, and he would be damned if he would allow a mere memory to undo him.

He had gotten his just desserts in the end. The son he had so belittled had developed teeth and a formidable will of his own. That much he _had_ inherited from the bilious, self-righteous son of a bitch, whether his illustrious sire acknowledged him or not, and one night, the pompous filibustering came to an abrupt and permanent end when Master Malfoy keeled facedown into his whipped potatoes, his conductor's baton nee fork clanging off the gold plate with a dissonant, atonal note of finality. _Ding dong, the prick is dead._

Reviled as the voice may have been in life, it was even more despised in death, but he had to admit that it was right. There were too few decent wizards left nowadays; most of them had been swallowed up by the tidal wave of maudlin sentiment masquerading as progressive thinking. Even those who believed as he did kept their feelings hidden behind tight-lipped smiles and upraised champagne flutes at the endless rounds of Ministry functions, afraid that if they dared speak the truth, the vengeful Ministry would suddenly find reasons to exclude them from the guest lists and investigate their tax returns from the past ten years. Just last month, he had seen Master Parkinson, one of the most ardent supporters of the Cause when the lights were dim and no one could put a name to the voice, fawning over that imbecile, Fudge, and his policies. It would have been funny had it not been so pathetic.

Not that Parkinson was a shining light of Pureblood superiority. Rumor had it that he had an insatiable appetite for Muggle prostitutes and had contracted syphilis from one of the disgusting wenches. The entire sordid incident had been kept very hush-hush, but even the best-kept secrets had a way of slipping their tether, especially when one is foolish enough to entrust their privacy and dignity to a loose-lipped and equally loose-moraled Mediwitch who could be bought for the price of a few Firewhiskeys and a quick fondling in the squalid lavatory inside her "practice." A dirty business, that; his hands had been scoured raw for days afterward, but it was all in the interest of the Cause, and if he did not make such noble sacrifices, who would?

He scrubbed his hand on the fabric of his robes to dispel the phantom stink and the viscous, warm egg-white texture of her arousal from his fingers, and his gorge rose in mutinous protest. He swore under his breath, furious at himself for allowing his mind to wander down these tangential paths when there were more important matters afoot. Never had his mental discipline faltered so badly, and that it should happen now, of all times, galled him.

He quickened his pace, and his mink traveling cloak was bunched so tightly in his hand that it was pulled nearly to the discreet, inoffensive swell of his buttocks. The fingers flexed and squirmed, still tormented by the recollection of unrequited lust and slick fish oil heat. His boots clacked on the fissured paving stones with haughty impatience, and the steam rose from his body like a curdled aura.

_It's this place, this gingerbread and spun sugar Babylon. You've always hated it. Even when you were a wet-nosed first-year, you couldn't stand it. While all your ostensible friends and feckless schoolmates swarmed to the cozily smoking chimneys and the heady pleasure of sweets that would make you turn out the contents of your affronted stomach in a steaming pile upon the snow, you remained behind, protected from the pervasive rot of the place by the stones of the castle Salazar Slytherin had helped build. You saw it for what it was, smelled the gangrenous decay beneath the postcard panorama of quaint cottages and smiling, bustling shopkeepers. Your father had done that much for you, at least. _

Tyrant, narcissist, misogynist, implacable taskmaster-his father had been all of these things and a thousand more that his refined etiquette refused to name twenty-four years after his unlamented demise, but he had also been an unparalleled educator. With his money, he had filled the sprawling expanse of the Malfoy library with volumes that not even Hogwarts, for all its eminence, could acquire, and there among the hulking, mahogany shelves, under the baleful, marble-bust gaze of his patriarch and with the subtle kerosene scent of wood polish in his nostrils, he had learned the secret history of the world into which he had been born, of the sects and organizations the Ministry had stricken from the public records in the name of preserving the peace and the status quo-Loyal Order of Mithras, eaters of flesh and bloodbathers who deified the sun and held the shedding of blood as the most righteous of sacraments; Cult of Cybele, ascetics who eschewed the pleasures of the flesh and castrated themselves as a show of devotion; Daughters of Dionysus, creatures of carnal delight who turned neither man, child, nor beast from their beds.

The names had danced upon the vellum and papyrus in a sinuous, seductive rhythm until they were all his eyes could see, swaying and undulating to the soporific, sibilant murmur of his father's voice, each of them a secret whispered in the dark watches of the night, while the Fates slumbered and fallen angels writhed between the legs of the daughters of men. They marched on in an endless litany, page after page. He had read until his eyes throbbed and burned and the tips of his fingers were gritty with crumbling parchment. Hundreds. Thousands. Tens of thousands. As numberless as the sands, and still he had devoured them.

Of the countless orders, societies, fraternities, and brotherhoods that had fallen beneath his feverish, avid gaze, one had enticed him above all others, lingering in his memory long after the books had been closed and the audience with his father had ended. Now, at forty-one, older and wiser and tempered by the harsh vagaries of life outside the halcyon pages of a storybook, he could look back upon his youthful fantasies with jaundiced amusement, but as a ten-year-old boy snuggled beneath the heavy woolen coverlet, those fancies had been the stuff of heroic legend and epic poetry. He, Lucius Malfoy, had been a general, clad, not in the gleaming white armor of honorable meekness, but in the living darkness of the Knights of Walpurgis. He had commanded the shadow armies that cavorted and gamboled across the canopy of his bed, with his fearless wand, he had driven back the vermin hordes that threatened his birthright, a birthright ceded to every Malfoy since the first had set foot in Saxony two thousand years before. He had done this, and his father had been proud of him, so proud that he never called him _boy_ again.

He had been thinking of the Knights of Walpurgis, he recalled now, as he strode down the street with his back straight and his head held high, on the day his father had taken him into their elaborate tea garden and finished his education. He had been thirteen, and the dew had glistened on the wild roses that struggled to flower amid the strangling ivy. He had been so surprised at the summons; aside from merciless rebukes and drunken harangues at the family table, his father had seldom bothered with his only son, but on that day all those years ago, his father had been almost convivial.

_"Come." Gentle for him, but no less a command. A long, slender hand extended in undeniable invitation. The sun reflected off the spotless silver of the serpent-headed cane clasped loosely in his hand._

_ "Yes, Father." _

_ The Boy Who Had Been had been reading on the divan, but he knew better than to ignore the summons. Disobedience had painful consequences, not least of which was the stinging, deceptive heft of the cane across his shoulders. He closed the book and rose to join his father. His stride was measured and light, a crisp clip that denoted purpose without undue haste. Just as his father had taught him._

_ They strolled through the French doors onto the garden path, a narrow, immaculate, winding creation fashioned of ancient cobblestones and tastefully aging mortar. Not so much as a stray leaf marred its pristine march to the tea garden. Father had taught the elves early and well the price for dereliction of duty, and more than one of the wizened, simpering little creatures had forfeited its meager life for one errant blade of grass. A squirrel darted onto the path, and his father idly raised his wand._

_ "_Crucio!"_ he drawled, and the little beast thrashed in the throes of scarlet agony. _

_ Its oildrop eyes bulged from its sockets, and the little forepaws drummed and spasmed in a grotesque, arrhythmic dance. Its bottlebrush tail lifted, and urine and feces erupted in an erratic spray. It emitted a shrill keen, and it seemed to Lucius, as he stood rooted to the spot in dazed fascination, that it was looking at him._

_"_Avada Kedavra!" _Uttered with the same laconic precision as the previous spell. _

_ The squirrel stilled, its last cry cut off with ruthless immediacy. It did not fade; it simply no longer was. His father slipped his wand into the sleeve of his robes again._

_ "Do you know _why_ I did that, Lucius?" he asked._

_ Lucius did not answer. He stared at the inert form of the squirrel. He was not appalled; rather, he was filled awe and a heady, illicit joy. He had heard of the Killing Curse, of course. There was not a young man among his social set who had not, and it was the chosen boast of those who wished to impress their goggle-eyed peers, though none actually managed to perform it when called upon to do so. But now he had seen it in all its terrible glory, and there was a torpid, tumescent heat between his legs. He swallowed with a dry click._

_ "Lucius! I asked you a question, boy." Soft as the honeysuckle breeze that tickled his nostrils, and deceptively benign. If he looked now, he would meet that dispassionate, narrow-eyed gaze._

_ His first instinct was to lie and say he understood; of course he did. He was the child of his father and a Malfoy, after all. But there was no place for deceit to hide beneath the bloodless scrutiny of pitiless Malfoy grey, and so he squared his shoulders, swallowed his oft-battered pride, and answered._

_ "No, Father." Ambrosia mingled with gall inside his mouth, his shame at his ignorance tempered by the lingering wonder of the Killing Curse._

_ His father snorted. "I suspected as much. Strains of your mother." He turned away and resumed his leisurely stroll, his hands clasped behind his back. The spring sun winked off the leering serpent mouth of his cane._

Bastard._ The thought was venomous and virulent, but his more prudent mouth only said, "I'm sorry, Father." Precisely what he was apologizing for, he did not know._

_ A noncommittal grunt. Then, after a bristling silence, "Because I could."_

_ Lucius blinked at the non-sequiter. "Father?"_

_ His father lifted the hem of his burgundy, silk robes stepped gingerly over the carcass of the squirrel, and his patrician face pulled into a delicate moue of disgust. Fat, greedy blackflies were already beginning to alight upon the body, and their tiny, spidersilk legs groped the stiffening flesh with the inelegant, clumsy fervor of a returning lover too long deprived of a sweetheart's embrace. _

_ "I killed that squirrel because I could. It was my right," his father said as if he were explaining to a mentally defective child that the sky was blue. "Man is superior to beast, and as such, we have a duty to remind them of our dominion. Even the Muggles know that. It's written in their religious texts." _

_ "You've read the Muggle religious texts?" Lucius said hoarsely. _

_ That his Pureblood father would defile his mind and soil his hands with Muggle pulp and propaganda staggered him. Surely his father, he who was so zealous in his defense of wizardkind, understood the poison that flowed through the Muggle quill? Surely he recognized the danger of listening to their deluded ravings or exposing one's eyes to their lunatic scribblings? His stomach gave an uneasy lurch, and he pressed his fingers to his lips to stifle an indecorous burp. He grimaced at the acidic aftertaste._

_ His father gave him a sardonic, mirthless smile. ""Know thine enemy. The first rule of engagement, or at least the first rule for anyone who truly wishes to win." He studied the flawless cuticle of one nail for a moment. "Yes, they are unpleasant and wholly irrational, but then, so are the wretches who crafted them. The utter illogic of them is astounding, really."_

_ Lucius pursed his lips, fascinated in spite of himself. "How so, Father?"_

_ His father cleared his throat and slowed his already languid pace still further. "'Thou shalt have no other gods before me, for I am a jealous god and easily wroth'". A derisive smirk, and then he continued. "For God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten Son, so that whomsoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.' A bit incongruous, isn't it? How could a deity consumed by such jealousy have room for any love at all, let alone a love so great that he would sacrifice his only child for the sake of the unwashed, lice-ridden rabble so audacious as to deny his very existence? Quite odd. One would almost think the ludicrous piffle was written by more than one person." He chuckled at his own wit._

You do father, _he wanted to say. _You are a living dichotomy, consumed by the divine fire of your convictions, yet cold as winter vengeance. You parade Mother and I around like trophies during the day, flaunt my existence as proof of your virility and revel in Mother's beauty as evidence of your masculine allure, but when the days draws to its inevitable end, and the bowing, scraping house elf closes the Manor door behind us and shuts the world out, when there is no longer a stage, in other words, all pretension falls away, and where the sophisticated, intelligent, even-handed lord of the manor once stood, there stands a bitter, volatile tyrant possessed of neither strength nor mercy.

The same hand that so tenderly caressed my mother's cheek on the promenade now reaches for the goblet or pounds on the table in an effort to drive reason into the insensate wood. The gilded tongue that so generously cast praises at my feet and extolled my virtue as the next great Malfoy scion to bring honor to our illustrious line as we sat in the posh drawing room of the Minister of Magic becomes a cutting scythe honed with the liberal application of Glenfiddich and rye, and the Pandora's Box is opened. All the dirty little secrets are brought to light, and even stuffing my fingers inside my ears cannot shut them out.

The demon brandy does what nothing else ever could-not love, not money, not honor, not even Slytherin expediency. It makes you tell the truth. Under its malefic sway, all the thoughts you suppress in the name of social grace emerge in a foul torrent. I, the pride of your sainted loins, become the disappointment you only allow to live because you are not certain you can father another, better son. Better to have a male mistake than a useless daughter. My mother, in public, the paragon of virtue and the Venus by which all other women should be measured, according to you, becomes the worthless, spent harridan who gave you nothing but a misbegotten son and her too-short youth. You sit upon your throne at the head of the table and spew your venom at us while the world around you whirls and teeters in an inebriated haze.

So, yes, I think love and hate can exist in equal measure in a man's heart and in a god's. I know because they live in mine. I love you because you are my father, but I despise you for it, too. At night, I lie in my bed and dream of the day Charon bears you away upon his accursed ferry and frees me of your scorn, but then I remember the fleeting moments when you were the father you should have been-the way you took my hand when I was a small boy and led me through the labyrinthine maze of Knockturn Alley because its dark delights frightened me, the night you sat beside my bed until the dawn, holding vigil as I shivered in the clammy grip of fever and fighting for my life with your unblinking eyes and white-knuckled grip on your beloved walking stick-and I am ashamed. You are my father. My unwavering adoration is yours by right, purchased by blood and future promise. My hatred, unlike my blood, cannot be pure.

_Lucius, who was still eleven years removed from the night his wildly swinging emotional compass would fix truth north and land the enormous Malfoy fortune squarely in his lap, and who was already learning the value of holding one's counsel, said nothing. He tucked his chin against his thin chest and strove for a look of aloof contemplation._

_ His father mistook his silence for dubious incredulity. "You are skeptical." It was not a question. "Another example, then." He narrowed his eyes and swept a stray platinum hair from his forehead with an impatient flick of one fine-boned wrist. "In Leviticus of the Old Testament-,"_

_ "The Old Testament, Father?"_

_ "They divided their religious text, their 'Bible,' into two separate and distinct halves, the Old Testament and the New Testament. They're convinced some filthy, itinerant lunatic was the savior of the world-they even capitalize the word 'Savior', if you can believe _that._ Such self-important creatures." _

_ "Any road, boy, if the lunatic was meant to be a messiah, he did a rather poor job of it. He and his merry band of witless lackeys traveled far and wide, spreading their message of peace, love, and mortification of all physical pleasure. He only-,"_

_ "What's 'mortification', Father?"_

_ "Do those overpaid incompetents at Hogwarts teach you nothing, boy?" he snapped. He was not accustomed to having his discourses interrupted. "Even if they haven't, that poncy private tutor should have." He froze and turned a shrewd, speculative gaze on his only son. "Unless, of course," he mused, his voice little more than a susurration of spent breath, "the odious little fop was teaching you more than your letters and arithmetic. Was he, boy?" A vague, predatory smile._

_ Lucius gaped at him. He knew he looked a feckless twit, standing there with his mouth open and his eyes round as tea saucers, but he couldn't help it. The insinuation was too horrid. Mr. Denueve was fey and willowy and walked like he suffered from perpetually inflamed hemorrhoids, but he had never done anything remotely untoward. Not even a look, and certainly not what his father was intimating. What he _thought_ his father was intimating, at least. His own sexuality was just beginning to blossom, and most of his knowledge was culled from the murmured gossip of older Slytherin boys and occasional surreptitious glimpses into the girls' lavatory on the fourth floor. Everything else was tantalizing rumor and sly innuendo._

_ His father tucked his walking stick beneath his arm and began to circle him in a slow, slinking stride, a lynx circling a terrified hare, and the clip of his boots on the cobblestone reminded him of the snick of feline claws on stone. _Click. _He could feel his father's smile on the sensitive flesh of his scalp, and it prickled with gooseflesh despite the spring warmth. _Click. Click. Click.

He's toying with me. _The thought was dazed and oddly plaintive. _My father is toying with me as if I were a novel plaything for his amusement. He knows Mr. Denueve has never done anything, but he wants to see how I'll react, see if I'll cry like a baby.__

Well, he wouldn't. He wasn't a little boy anymore, clutching his father's hand and plagued by nightmares of the leathery, eyeless head floating in a jar of formaldehyde in Mr. Borgin's shop, a head that still bobbed in a cloud of hair as thick and dark as rotted kelp. He was twelve, nearly thirteen, almost a man, and he was a Malfoy. That above all, and Malfoy men didn't weep. Tears were for women and ponces.

Click._ Directly behind him now, and so close that he could smell the eau du cologne his father imported from France. Warm silk brushing his narrow back and even warmer breath against the shell of his ear. His own breath caught in his throat, and his heart fluttered in an uneasy staccato against his ribs._

_ "I asked you a question, boy, and you have failed to answer. How shall I take your silence? Is it revulsion that binds your tongue, or guilt? Have I perchance stumbled upon a hidden truth?" His father's chin grazed his shoulder, and his voice carried with it the lascivious purr of suggestion._

_ Lucius fought the urge to squirm. His mouth was dry as steel wool, and his bladder was a hot, shrunken sac beneath his skin. He prayed that he would not wet himself. His father would not forgive such a childish display. But that was not the worst of it. His father was speaking again, using a vocabulary he had never suspected him to possess, and the combination of the lurid words and the illicit heat against the shell of his ear was making him stir beneath his robes._

_ It was an automatic response, involuntary as a retch, but that did not lessen his shame. He clenched his fists at his sides and closed his eyes, and behind his eyelids, his father's incessant whispers fashioned themselves into obscene images he could not escape. He twitched almost painfully and stifled a groan. _

_ His father chuckled. "A confession?"_

_"No, Father," he rasped, and shook his head violently. His throat constricted, and each word felt like cartilaginous gristle on his tongue. "Mr. Denueve has never done anything."_

_ "Are you certain?" Fingers plucked idly at the shoulder of his robes._

_ "Yes, Father." He swallowed with a click._

_ "Hmm," was the only response, and though his eyes were still closed, Lucius knew he was tapping his chin with one thin finger. "If he did, would you tell me?"_

_ He nodded. "Of course, Father."_

_ "Would you? I wonder. Perhaps you enjoyed it. There _are_ a few of that sort on your mother's side from what I understand. I did not discover the unfortunate truth until after the wedding. If I had, I never would have married her. She was smart enough to know that much, the devious little bint." Almost musing now. "I underestimated her once. Never again."_

_ His father had gone mad. That was the only sane explanation for this surreal episode. Even in his drunken rages, he had never been so erratic, so unfocused. Somehow Leviticus and Muggle religion had shunted them down the path of his burgeoning sexuality, the possible proclivities of his effete tutor, and the legion and ever-growing shortcomings of his mother, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't see the connection. Adolescent outrage and stunned perplexity were rapidly giving way to terror. It was fear that hardened him now, and his manicured nails bit into the slick flesh of his palms._

_ "Women are cunning creatures, boy," his father was saying now, and there was a hint of bitter admiration in his voice. " They worship Mammon, and they will stop at nothing to get as much of it as they can. No means are too nefarious, no lie too crass. They will seduce you with sweet lies and even sweeter caresses, and by the time you realize the wicked they have done, it is far, far too late. You are ensnared, trapped by foolish vows and a belly full of child that she claims is yours." A derisive bark of laughter._

_ Lucius wasn't sure what Mammon was, nor did he care. He wanted his father to stop talking, to spare him this unflinching honesty. He did not want to hear it. He wished to be left with the naïve childhood belief that his parents had loved one another and still loved him. He wanted to find rest in the illusion he had been conceived in love and that what lurked beneath his father's face was not the monster unleashed by drink and disappointment, but the man who had once taken him to the local Renaissance faire and spent Galleons as if they were water between his fingers. He had never asked any questions about the life his parents had lived before he was or what they thought of him in their deepest heart, and he had demanded no answers. _

_ He wanted to fold in upon himself, sink to the ground with his hands clapped over his ears, but his stubborn pride would not allow it. It stiffened his knees and his neck, and he could only stand rigid as a tentpole and listen to his father desecrate every cherished hope he had ever had._

Click. Click. _His father was moving again, and for one wild moment, he thought the torment was finally at an end, but then his father said, "'I love you' is a woman's poison, boy, deadly as arsenic and thrice as slow. Never trust it. Enjoy their pleasures and their beauty and do what you must to preserve the bloodline, but always remember, boy, that it's not you they love; it's your money. Given a choice between an orgasm and a cold Galleon in their palm, they'll choose the latter every time. Do you understand?" A cool hand squeezed his shoulder in a bruising grip._

_ No, he didn't understand. He had never understood anything less in his life, as a matter of fact, but he nodded anyway. He would have agreed that they sky was fuchsia if it meant that he would release him and let him flee to the cool, sterile elegance of the Manor. He nodded until his blond hair fell into his tightly closed eyes and the tendons of his neck creaked, until he was nauseated and dizzy with the force of his assent._

_ "I'm afraid I can't hear you." Laughter in his father's voice._

_ Burning warmth on his palms and a saline scald in the corners of his eyes. _You are my father, _he wanted to shout. _You are my father. Why are you doing this? Why won't you stop? _The need for it was massed inside his chest, the weight of a thousand ancient pressing stones, but he would not surrender to it. He was a Malfoy, and he would let no man reduce him to a shivering, sniveling wreck. Not even his father._

_ The iron grip on his shoulder tightened still further, and he gritted his teeth against a cry of pain. "I believe I asked you a question, boy." Low and dangerous. "Do you understand what I have told you or not?"_

_ "Yes, Father, I understand." He was dismayed to find that his voice had risen by several octaves in the extremity of his fear._

_ A contemptuous snort, but the hand on his shoulder relaxed. "I hardly think so. Just like your mother. Willing to say whatever you must to achieve the desired result." The hand withdrew completely, but his father did not step away from him. Instead, he pressed closer still. "Now that we have satisfactorily resolved the matter of your truthfulness," he sneered, "we will return to my previous query. Has that poncy tutor of yours put his hands on you?"_

_ "No, Father, I swear it." He began to weep, and he hated himself for it. His father would never believe him now. How could he, when he was blubbing like a child not yet out of nappies? He scrubbed furiously at his traitorous eyes until spots of color filled his blurry field of vision._

_ "Stop that useless sniveling," his father demanded, and shoved him with the point of his cane._

_ The next thing Lucius knew, he was on his hands and knees on the garden path, and the rough cobblestones scraped his already bleeding palms. His knees throbbed with the force of the impact, and his chest hitched with a ragged sob. There was a red-hot spike embedded in his bladder, and if his father did not permit him to go to the lavatory soon, he was going to have an accident. He opened his mouth to speak, but all that emerged was a choked mewl._

_ Click. Click. The tip of the cane appeared on the uppermost periphery of his vision. He studied his ghostly, distorted reflection in the silver. His eyes were wide and rheumy with tears, and glistening droplets clung to his platinum eyelashes and coursed down his mottled cheeks. A runner of mucus dangled from the end of his nose like translucent tinsel, and he had nearly raised his forearm to his nose to brush it away before he remembered himself and let it drop again._

_ "I said stop that sniveling, boy." _

_ His father gave the order as if he were addressing a common house elf, and beneath the shame and the fear that coated his throat like bile and squeezed his bladder and his viscera in ruthless, burning, crushing fingers, rage seethed. It was hot and comforting inside his chest, a poultice to chase away the stupefying ague, and he moaned low in his throat, the lament of a wounded beast trapped beneath the cruel, greedy tip of the huntsman's bow._

I hate you. You are nothing but a coward and a bully, a straw man who hides behind his wealth and his inherited prestige. For all your rhetoric, all your table-pounding and bellowing, you've never put your lofty words into action. You've waved your goblet and brandished your cherished cane and spread your gospel from your monied pulpit, but I have never seen you practice what you preach. How many Muggles have you killed? How many Mudbloods? Not one. They breed us out of existence, rutting in their dingy hovels like rabbits. For every Pureblooded child to greet the dawn, there come three mongrels. And yet you make no move to boost our numbers. You and Mother sleep in separate beds in separate rooms, and drunken snores and the rustle of shifting bedclothes are the only sounds that drift from beneath your door. No, you do nothing. You are content to talk; you will still be proselytizing when they overrun us and throttle us in our beds.

_The realization struck him with the force of religious conversion. Had he been aware of the tale, he would have said that he was Saul on the road to Damascus. The scales had fallen from his eyes, and for the first time, with dirt beneath his nails, his blood drying on his palms, and the sun warm on his back, he saw his father as he truly was. But he did not know the tale. Unlike his father, he had never debased himself by reading Muggle books. His heart and his mind were as pure as the blood in his veins, and so he laughed, a thick, hysterical chuff._

Click_. The shadow of his father loomed over him and blotted out the warmth of the sun, but Lucius was unafraid. He had seen the man behind the curtain, and all his childhood terror had drifted away, the lifting of a thick, enshrouding fog. The monster had proven to be little more than shadows and mist. A trick of the light. Or the darkness, if you wished. The knowledge made him giddy, and he shook with laughter._

_ "Get up, boy. I will not tell you again."_

_ Lucius made no move to obey. Indeed, he gave no sign that he had heard his father at all. He stayed where he was, hands pressed into the unforgiving stone of the garden path. The truth had set him free, and he was no longer beholden to the voice that had held dominion over him for so long. He watched his blood stain the paving stone with hypnotized fascination._

Look, Father,_ he wanted to exclaim. _Consecrated ground.

_ The first blow struck him between the shoulder blades, and there was a moment of dazed numbness before the flare of pain exploded in his upper back. Another blow rained down, and then another, and he writhed and wept beneath the assault, but amid the sobs and the blind flailing, there was laughter, a wheezed, triumphant bark that slipped from between grimacing lips._

Hit me all you like, but it will change nothing, _he thought as the cane came down on his hip with a wicked, whickering crack. _

_ He shrieked and clutched at the spot with clawed hands, but the cane had already moved on to choicer targets. It smashed across his twitching buttocks with a meaty _pop_, and mingled mirth and misery bubbled from his throat. There was no part of him that did not ache and throb, and in the morning, he would be so bruised and stiff that the house elves would need to help him into his clothes, but for now, he was lost in a delirium of agonized epiphany._

I'm better than you, and one day, I will prove it. I will do what you could not. Would not. I will kill as many Mudbloods and Muggles as I can before my end, and for every squalling, red infant squeezed from between the legs of a soft-bellied Mudblood whore, I will sire a Pureblooded child to stand against him. The streets will run red with the blood of my enemies and platinum with the tresses of my progeny. If I cannot crush them, I will outbreed them. One way or another, I will snuff them out and restore the family honor, and when I do, I will blot you from the family records and piss upon your grave.

The cane struck him in the kidneys, and his bladder let go in a hot, wet gush, vinegar and peat, and his nostrils pinched to shut out the indelicate stench. He was a refined child, and some things could not be unlearned, not even under torture. He pulled into a fetal position and moaned helplessly, and a frightened thrush took flight from an overhead tree.

_"Stop crying, you stupid boy," his father panted, his face mottled with fury and exertion. "And get up."_

_ He was tempted to just lie there on the sun-warmed stone and let the urine cool on his legs. The slightest movement brought with it a sizzling aria of untold pain, and if he tried to rise, there was a very good possibility that his breakfast would make an unscheduled reappearance._

How very gauche,_ he thought stupidly, and then gave up thought altogether. _

_ "Last warning, boy." His father's voice, far away and unimportant. _

_ His eyelids drooped with fatigue and blissful indifference. Yes, he would just stay here a while. Here where it was safe and cool._

_ Rough fingers seized the collar of his robes and jerked him unceremoniously to his feet. Pain swallowed him whole, and if the fingers had not been clutching his collar in a vise grip, he would have fallen to the ground again. His head throbbed like an infected tooth, and when he tried to turn it on his oddly boneless neck, acid-tipped fingers sank into his scalp and scratched bright, kaleidoscopic colors into the inkblots that danced before his eyes. He clutched feebly at his father as he swayed drunkenly on his feet. His left ankle refused to support him. The salt and alum taste of blood puckered his mouth._

_ "Get up, you puling little whelp," his father snarled. "Stand on your own two feet. Look at you." His eyes raked Lucius' disheveled, sodden robes in slit-eyed disgust. "You're weak. You allow your emotions to rule you. I had you weeping like a babe within three minutes. You're no son of mine. No product of my loins would behave so shamefully. Changeling, you are, or fetch, but you are no son of mine. I do not sire cowards." He straightened his robes with a haughty flourish._

_ Lucius decided not to point out the irony in that statement. Another blow would render him unconscious, and he had no desire to be found facedown in his own spittle by a privately gleeful house elf. Even at twelve, he understood that dignity was a precious thing, and once it was gone, no amount of railing or bribery could restore it. So he straightened his hunched, bruised shoulders and gazed at his father with bleary, glazed eyes._

_ "Appalling," his father huffed. "You've wet yourself." He stared at the pungent dampness that stained the front of Lucius' robes, and his nostrils pinched in a belated bid for self-protection. "No better than a Mudblood. Would the Fates that you had been a Squib. At least then I could have killed you." The last emerged in a forlorn, aching whisper, and for an instant Lucius saw the bone-deep misery and cancerous disappointment in his father's eyes. Then it was gone, replaced by his customary indifference and assured superiority. "As it is, there is no point in continuing this discussion. I can teach you nothing. Get out of my sight. I don't want to see you again. You will take supper in your room."_

Oh, but you did teach me, Father. More than you know, more than you ever intended. The lesson was painful, but there can be no joy without suffering. These welts will fade, but the knowledge each one bought and paid for is mine to keep, and when the time comes, I will use it. I have to. Despite all your protests, I am of you, a Malfoy, and the pursuit of power is in my blood as surely as the gene for the grey eyes that so captivate the unwary. I can no more not use it than I could cease to breathe, and in the end, I will do what I must, and so will you. It's in our nature.

_His father spared him one last gelid glance, then spun on his heel and stalked in the direction of the Manor. Even in his anger, he moved with a queer, unhurried grace, his strides brisk but unhurried. His shoulders were relaxed, and his spine was straight. _I go at this pace because I choose it, and nothing in heaven and earth will change it,_ that gait said, and in that moment, at least, it was true._

_ Lucius watched his father go with mingled contempt and pity, and as his figure disappeared from view, a vertiginous longing seized him, and he was tempted to call after him, run in his wake with hands outstretched in silent appeal, the way he had done as a small toddler, when the days had passed in an idyll of games and sweets, and all he had wanted was to grow up to be just like his father._

_ The compulsion was so strong that his mouth opened of its own accord, and the word was half-out before he closed it with a jaw-creaking snap that made his teeth ache. His heart spasmed inside his chest, and for the second time that morning, his vision was occluded by the glycerin haze of tears._

Daddy. I almost called him Daddy,_ he thought with swooning incomprehension. _I haven't done that since I was five years old.__

_ He vomited soundlessly onto his shoes and the urine-sticky hem of his robes, bent double with the force of the retching, crescent-scraped palms on his shaking knees. Over and over again, until his stomach was loose and hot and his throat was raw and greasy with bile. He heaved until he was sure he was going to pass out or rupture the minute capillaries in his eyes. Blooming red blots pooled in his vision, and his head felt bloated and soft, an overripe melon left too long in the sun. When there was no more food left, he sent up thick clots of bitter mucus._

Can't go back. Too late for that. It was too late a long time ago._ He wiped a trembling hand over his lips and stared unseeingly at the congealing mass of his former breakfast. _I wish it wasn't, but it is.__

_ When he was certain that the worst had passed, he took a ragged, greedy gulp of air that tasted of warm stone and cooling bile and the rich, cilantro perfume of new growth and wobbled upright again. He tested his left ankle and was rewarded with a bright bolt of pain. He swore under his breath. He would be damned if he would be helped into the house by a simpering, wrinkled house elf. That sort of thing would make fine fodder for their clandestine gossip mill as they lay in their squalid rag piles. _

His father was long gone, and the way of life he had always known had gone with him. He spit to rid his mouth of its sour, iodine tang and hobbled and limped toward the Manor and the cool solace of his mother's fluttering hands, following in his father's footsteps for the last time.

_Except it wasn't the last time, was it? _whispered a voice inside the head of theman he had become. _Not by a long chalk._

He quickened his pace. He did not want to hear this. He was nothing like his father, nothing at all. No, he was far superior, and he had proven it time and again. He had killed his first Mudblood at seventeen. _He_ had taken action against the looming Muggle threat, and he had not been afraid. He had enjoyed the kill, relished the death throes of his adversaries. He had killed them with magic and with daggers, and he had spared neither woman nor child, invalid nor aged. He no longer knew how many he had killed, but one was more than the sum total of what his father and all his rhetoric had accomplished, and that filled him with a heady pride.

_It was his rhetoric that set you upon this path in the first place. Were it not for him, you might well have ended up like the bleeding-heart, soft-headed inclusionists you so despise. Whatever you are, it was founded on his teachings. You are the sum of your history, and you would do well to remember it._

It was precisely because he remembered his history that he had joined the Death Eaters at seventeen, and imagine his surprise, and indeed, his pleasure, upon learning that he had found his home in what was once the Knights of Walpurgis, the ancient order he had so revered as a boy. His childhood dreams had come to fruition. He was a Knight, sworn protector of the purity of his kind, and with his enthusiasm and his family's influence, he had set about ridding the world of those who polluted it with their very existence.

It was precisely because he remembered his history that the son deemed to be naught but a multitude of his father's failings had risen up at twenty-one to bring him down. The boy too thick to understand his ravings had come into his manhood and his inheritance by the cool heft of marble in his hands and the razor-wire burn of anger too fierce to be satiated by prudence or filial deference. He had prised the cane from the stiffening hand of its former master and claimed it for his own, anointed king by the spreading pool of blood at his feet. Six days later, his father was in the ground, victim of a most unfortunate fall, and his dowager mother was sent to the Isle of Man with a kiss and a promise of a monthly stipend from her dutiful son.

It was precisely because he remembered his history that he had taken Narcissa Black to wife at twenty-three. Beautiful, charming, intelligent, Pureblooded Narcissa, who knew her place and who could satisfy him with her wicked mouth and her dainty hands and her heated thighs. Narcissa, whom he adored and to whom he had never raised a hand. Narcissa, whose memory had borne him through the long nights of torture in the Ministry interrogation rooms, and who sometimes still trailed her manicured nails down the white, puckered tendrils left to him as a reminder of his ordeal.

It was precisely because he remembered his history that at twenty-five, he had sired Draco, the wriggling, wailing, wrinkled incarnation of all his hope for the future. How proud he had been when the Mediwitch had lain him in his arms, so proud that he had hardly noticed when the screaming, kicking bundle baptized him in a rush of effluvium. What difference had it made, really? After all, the healthy boy-child had been nothing less than an extension of he and Narcissa's perfection.

_She was not so perfect. You found that out shortly after your release from Azkaban, didn't you? Oh, my, yes. You returned home after your ordeal intent upon siring more children, more sons, perhaps even a daughter or two for the purpose of forging profitable alliances in the future. An entire brood. You wanted to proliferate, spread your seed to the ends of the earth with an army of grey-eyed, platinum-haired children. You swore that you would when you were but a child yourself, and you were determined to see it done._

_ The corridors of Malfoy Manor reverberated with the strident creak of bedsprings such as they had never done in your father's lifetime, and Narcissa, your sacred wife, parted her legs and thought of merry olde England because that was what you required of her. Every night for weeks on end, you sowed your seed within her womb, the seed for which countless fawning young women had vied at galas and cotillion balls, and you hoped and prayed and made offerings to gods in whom you had no belief. Anything to further your goals._

_ Three times, your seed took root, and three times you congratulated yourself on your virility and swanned through the streets of Wiltshire with your head held high and your bollocks held higher. One son was to become two, and the fear that your illustrious line would be wiped out in a single, calamitous quirk of fate reduced to exorcised memory. If one fell, there would be another to take his place._

_ But the promised second scion never came. One by one, they bled away. No matter how many Galleons you spent or how many specialists you bribed and threatened, no matter how much of your cherished dignity you shed behind closed doors, you could not persuade them to stay inside the womb until the appointed hour. _

_ The first bled away when it was little more than jubilant anticipation. The entire process was oddly…tidy. You expected blood and gnashing of teeth, but there was only mild discomfort, fatigue, nausea, and an usually heavy menses. You only know it was a son because the pompous Mediwizard told you so. Otherwise, it was an unidentifiable lump of might have been._

_ The second made it four months. You allowed yourself to relax, to plan. You even bought a lavish bassinet. Then it, too, slipped away in a warm, red tide that smelled of copper and fish oil, and it was very bad, indeed, because the misbegotten child nearly took Narcissa with it. She almost bled to death in the bed in which the child was conceived, a pale, helpless sacrifice to your ambition, but the Mediwizard saved her life and his own that night. That one was a son, too. You looked at it before he took it away, and then you went into the lavatory and retched until you couldn't breathe. You swore there would be no more._

_ That was one promise you couldn't keep. You couldn't smother the-and pardon me for this pun, oh, yes, indeed-narcissistic urge to recreate yourself again, to do what your father had not. You were so determined to set yourself apart from him that you asked Narcissa to try again, and because she loved you, because she was a good and faithful wife, she put aside her private fears and tried again_. _And you paid dearly for your hubris, didn't you? _The voice laughed, dead leaves on dry paving stone.

The muscles of his legs cramped with the urge to run, but he was too well-trained to capitulate to their demands, and so he continued at the same brisk, assured pace, his gloved hand fisted around his walking stick, his jaw set in a tight, throbbing line. He would not be chased from here by the restless demons of his past and the impotent shades of desires unfulfilled. He would leave this execrable shantytown behind and kick its tainted dust from his heels, but not until he wished it.

The voice was unimpressed with his resolve, and it continued its soliloquy with implacable equanimity.

_The third was the cruelest of all. You and Narcissa were so cautious, so wary. You tended to her with obsessive care, alert for the slightest hint of danger. You became a manservant in your own house; you waited upon her hand and foot, and as each day passed without incident, you gave thanks to the Fates for one more mercy. Six months passed, and then seven, and as she grew round and ponderous with your child, the pride you had banished in the name of prudence reared its head once more. The night she went into labor, you summoned the midwives and the Mediwizards, and when that was done, you ordered the house elves to bring up a bottle of your finest sauvignon in preparation for the celebration to come. But it never came._

He grunted behind gritted teeth and resisted the juvenile compulsion to clap his hands to his ears. He did not want to hear this, did not, did _not._ These wounds were old, but they were not well healed, and he doubted they ever would be. He was reminded of them too often as he wandered the silent corridors and echoing parlors of his Manor. He wanted the voice to go away and leave him be, but it cared little for either his pedigree or his anguish.

_Why should I be silent? _it leered, and an image arose in his mind of a black-toothed imp capering in malevolent glee. _I have been with you ever and anon, and I will never leave. I am the sum of all your failures. I lived in your father before you, and when you are dust and bones and the fetor of a forgotten life inside your crypt, I will abide with your son. I am your legacy, along with your surname and your wealth._

_ Now, where was I? Oh, yes. The third. The wine came, and as the hours came and went, you watched the condensation bead on the glass and listened to the muffled sounds behind your chamber doors, groans and sobbed imprecations that not even the thick English oak could stifle, and when you could take no more, you paced to and fro across your study floor. Back and forth, back and forth, until your footfalls fell into unconscious synchronization with the tick of the clock and the hypnotic swing of its heavy brass pendulum. Time surrendered its meaning, measured, not in minutes and hours, but in steps and screams, and when the door finally swung open, you were so startled that you nearly hexed the sweating, beaming midwife._

_ That bitch. You've never forgiven her for that smile, that brief, glorious moment of false hope in which you thought it was going to be all right. To this day, you don't understand why she did it. You've puzzled over it in the hours before dawn, while Narcissa sleeps and morning steals into the sky to depose the night. Was it malevolence or crass stupidity? The answer doesn't matter, not really, but you persist all the same, like a man who cannot resist running his tongue over the notch in a chipped tooth to reassure himself it is still there. It serves no other purpose than to stoke your anger, and sometimes that is all you have left._

_ But enough philosophizing. Whatever her motives, she smiled and placed the bundle in your arms, and you were so relieved by the warm heft in the crook of your arms that you didn't realize what you held at first. Then you looked down, and the smile froze on your face, and the joyous benediction died in your throat. You blinked, and then you closed your eyes altogether, but when you opened them again, it was still there, and all the while, the feckless cow that called herself midwife stood and gazed at you in beatific, lack-witted happiness, as if she had handed you the world and not a travesty of flesh._

_ It was in the odd slant of the forehead and the misshapen eyes, in the flattened nose and the logy, drugged reflexes. When Draco was born, he had gazed up at you with an expression of secretive triumph, as if he had known all along that he was meant to be, but that one's eyes were empty, dull as unglazed glass inside its mongoloid face. Spittle turned to talc inside your mouth, and your knees were wooden joists beneath the skin. You wanted to laugh and scream by turns, but to lose your composure in front of that moon-faced, heavy-bosomed inferior would have been more than your shocked dignity could stand, and so you did neither. You just…stared._

_ You didn't, not right away. You waited until all the Mediwizards and midwives had collected their fees and departed, and as you watched them clatter down the Manor steps with your hard-earned Galleons clutched in their grubby fists, you wanted to hex them all, to see them writhe upon the snow with screams streaming from their mouths like obscene Yuletide carols. They had taken your money, and in return, they had delivered unto you, not the coveted second male heir, but a conglomeration of limbs and viscera fashioned into the twitching, dribbling effigy of a girl-child. But you stayed your wand and watched them disappear down the boulevard. You entered the name of the midwife into your ledger for future remuneration, and then you went inside._

_ It was after midnight by the time you worked up the courage. You stole into the room and stood there for a very long time, just looking. Under cover of darkness, it looked like any other child, all flailing arms and tiny, splay-toed feet, and it was easy, nay, tempting to pretend that it had all been a terrible illusion, that it was hale and whole, a Pureblooded dauphine, but you knew that morning would come all too soon, and when it did, its cruel light would dispel all your maudlin notions._

_ So you did it. A newborn's flesh is soft and yielding as fresh taffy, and as you stood there and wrung the life from it with a patient, merciless grip, you marveled at it. So tiny and so misbegotten, and yet if fought for its life. It possessed that much intelligence, at least. In a perverse way, you admired it. A Malfoy to the last._

_ But that was terrible, wasn't it, that thought? That meant it was yours, and that was more than you so bear, and so when it was done, you lurched into the lavatory and scrubbed your hands in scalding water until they bled. You scoured the skin from beneath your nails, and while the water swirled rose and crimson down the drain, you offered up a thousand reasons why it had to be done. Each drop and each bit of skin was grace and absolution._

_ Its existence would have been a misery, for both it and you. It would have been the sordid family secret, locked in a filthy back room, unknown, unloved, and willfully unremembered. A waste of resources and time. Hardly marriageable. No one in their right mind would have had her, not even the social-climbing parasites bent on staking a claim to the prodigious Malfoy fortune, and those who would have were diseased branches no one wanted forking from their family trees. No, it was for the best._

_ And then there was the Cause to consider. What would her existence have done to the cherished belief that the Pureblooded were inherently, genetically superior to the Mudbloods? She would have been held up by proponents of the Light as irrefutable proof that all your rhetoric was wish and self-delusion. The great Lucius Malfoy, progenitor of a defective. How they would jeer. Her every breath would have brought shame to the House of Malfoy, and visited the rage of the Dark Lord upon your head. Your position, the rank you had clawed from his twisted, bloodless heart and paid for with every sinuous stripe upon your back, would have been forfeit, and that you could not allow. You were a father, yes, but you were a Slytherin above all._

_ You ordered it burned, and that was the last you saw of it. Draco never knew he had a sibling, and Narcissa never asked you what had become of her second child. There was no need. She knew you too well. You reported it dead that afternoon, and your money silenced the uneasy questions as to the whereabouts of the body. A few more ensured that neither a birth nor a death certificate remained on file at the Ministry. The six short hours of its life were expunged from the record as easily as an unwanted stain, and that's precisely what it was._

_ But for all that, the night you crushed your unfinished daughter's larynx in your hand was the night you secretly set yourself against the Dark Lord. The puling creature on the cot might have been a misbegotten parody of the Divine, but she was yours, and you never ceded a sole possession without exacting a terrible price. You had sacrificed flesh and blood to the cause, and you would have your just rewards._

"I want no more of this," he spat, and several passersby spared him wary, sidelong glances. "What purpose does it serve?"

_Because I choose it, _the voice mused idly. _Because I want to show you how very like your father you are. You despise your wife and your son, just as he did._

_ I do not. I love them. I have never raised a hand to them._

_ You don't need to. They see it in your face well enough. How could they not? You wear your disdain for them like a badge of honor. You haven't touched Narcissa since she cursed you with that blasphemous imp, and the mere thought of bedding her turns your stomach and shrivels your testicles. You blame her. _

Of course he did. She had promised him the world and an army of flawless heirs, and all that she had given him was a spineless, mollycoddled son and a waste of flesh, sinew, and social currency gone before it was even named. Her delicate, porcelain face had masked the insidious rot of inbreeding, and by the time he had seen the malignant madness glittering in Bellatrix Black's eyes and smoldering in the lunatic gaze of that mongrel blood traitor, Sirius, it had been too late. His heart had been her plaything, and his wedding band had gleamed on her finger. An annulment was out of the question. A Malfoy never acknowledged failure.

_Which brings us to your son, _the voice continued with mordant glee. _Such a disappointment. Irresponsible, blithely ignorant of all that has gone before and so certain that, as it was today, so will tomorrow be, and the day after, and the day after, with no effort. No sacrifice. He is content to take while giving nothing in return, and to you who has surrendered so much, his entitlement is an insult. You wonder, in the sepulchral silence of your Manor, when the moon glazes the world silver and the only sounds are the rustle of bedclothes and Narcissa's susurrating breath, how much better your life would have been had your other sons survived. You wonder, and you lament._

His lips thinned. Very soon now, all of his woe and lamentation would be over. The letter from his carefully cultivated associate had hinted at a portentous discovery, and though it was entirely possible it was no more than favor-currying claptrap, he was inclined to believe it. The sender had never been prone to hyperbolic histrionics, and he was keenly aware of the penalty for wasting his valuable time.

_I have found something that may prove of great interest to a person of mutual acquaintance. Its proper use could be quite profitable in future joint ventures._

Indeed.


	47. Frog and Mongoose: The Liars' Cotillion...

Chapter Forty-Seven

While Lucius Malfoy was cutting a swath through Hogsmeade and the twisted labyrinth of his memories, Rebecca was hunched in the corner of the fifth-year girls' dormitory, watching with blank mica eyes as Madam Toad and Dawlish searched her belongings for the second time. Kingsley Shacklebolt stood beside her, one long-fingered hand on her knobby shoulder, and the urge to shake it off was a maddening itch beneath her skin.

"It will be all right, Miss Stanhope," he assured her in his rich, resonating baritone. "Everything will be left just as we found it."

"Oh, indeed it will," cooed Umbridge as she pawed through her underclothes with inelegant, pudgy hands. "Unless, of course, we should find something pertinent to our investigation." A high, fluting titter.

"Naturally, ma'am." An indolent, heavy-lidded blink.

_Rather wide scope you've given yourself, isn't it? You can take anything you like, and there is nothing I can say. Well, no matter. I know what you're looking for, and you'll never find it. Never, never, never because for all your bureaucratic myopia, it's so close that you can't see it, and even if you could, you would never defile yourself by taking it. The very thought turns your stomach. There's no telling the pestilence I carry, is there? _Behind her wan, inscrutable face, she smiled.

She shifted in her seat, and cold metal grazed her ankle, sharp and piercing as the fang of a serpent. The smile behind the mask widened, and she reached to quiet the furtive tickle of clandestine silver. Umbridge and Dawlish paid her no mind as they bustled around the bed. She was as inconsequential as a coat rack to them, and she liked it that way. Her bespoked warden had become ally. The Lord worked in mysterious ways, glory, glory alleluia.

She had slipped the Head of House pin into her sock that morning after her bath. There had been neither rhyme nor reason to the action, no hope of calculated subterfuge. At least, she hadn't thought so then. It had simply seemed imprudent and disrespectful of her to leave it buried among her oft-assaulted undergarments, subjected to the stale memory of old unintended voidings. Beneath her pillow had been no better. Winky was not the only elf responsible for the cleaning of the dormitories, and if one of the tidying house elves had discovered it stashed under her pillow, it would have been disastrous. Even if they hadn't, she ran the risk of some busybody chambermate happening by it in an inexplicable fit of solicitude, and there wasn't a soul among her Housemates who hadn't wished to see that accursed pin ground to so much glittering dust a thousand times over. So she had done the only thing she could and secreted it against her clammy, maligned flesh.

"You don't have anything you'd like to tell us, do you, dear?" Umbridge had forsaken the ransacking of her underwear in favor of overturning the bedclothes, and she spared Rebecca a shrewd, sidelong glance.

"No, ma'am." She watched impassively as her crisp bedsheets were tossed to the floor in a rumpled heap.

"Mmm." Umbridge patted the mattress in brisk, fluttering strokes, searching for suspicious lumps or indentations, and Rebecca was reminded of a malevolent Helen Keller groping sightlessly for her infernal walking stick. "If you _did_ know something, child, better for you to make a clean breast of it. Better for you and for your conscience."

_What would you know of conscience, you vicious old crone? Yours curdled years ago, if you had one at all. You bartered it for rank and the iron rod of authority, and you wear both like an honored mantle. Conscience to you is not a guide but a tool to be used against those who carry it. You wheedle, and you cajole, and you pervert their good intentions to your own end, but there is no milk of kindness in the marrow of your bones, no quiet voice to help you stay the course. Those bereft of consciences should not speak of them._

Rebecca merely shook her head and offered a vague smile.

_What of your conscience? asked her grandfather, ever the devil's advocate._

A careless, internal shrug. _What about it? _

She shifted her gaze and watched Dawlish rummage through the contents of her night table with languid efficiency. Leathery, swollen-knuckled fingers picked through the conglomeration of wadded tissues, scraps of parchment, empty inkwells, and old quills. He picked up a stick of lip balm and pinched it between thumb and forefinger as if it were an interesting and heretofore undiscovered specimen of bug.

"Miss, what is this?" he asked gruffly, and turned the stick in a slow, contemplative circle. Umbridge immediately scurried to get a closer look, eyes bulging in salacious anticipation of another neck for the gallows.

Rebecca blinked in surprise. "It's Muggle lip balm, sir."

Dawlish turned the stick upside down and shook it. "Muggle lip balm," he repeated incredulously.

"Of course you realize that we'll have to take this for closer inspection," Umbridge purred, and her fat, pink tongue darted out to moisten her lips. She rubbed her palms together, sandpaper in desert heat.

"Yes, ma'am," Rebecca answered, and gave a brusque, jerky nod of affirmation.

Dawlish produced a small drawstring pouch from the voluminous folds of his robes with a grave flourish, and he slipped the balm inside, moving with the pompous reverence of a vicar giving the Eucharist, and Rebecca clapped a hand over her mouth to smother an unseemly spate of giggles.

_ Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been fifteen years since my last confession. I have had impure thoughts. I have dishonored my father and mother. I have taken the Lord's name in vain. I prefer the shower setting on pulsate rather than spray. Oh, and I've defiled myself with lip balm. In the name of the chapped lips, the cold sore, and the herpes simplex II, amen._

A treacherous chuff escaped her, and Umbridge, who was divesting her bed of its linen slipcover, paused and quirked one thin eyebrow.

"Did you say something, dear?" Careless, almost indifferent, but the reptilian glint in her eyes belied her. The rings on her fingers clacked like dried phalanges as she shook the linens.

Inexplicable laughter tickled her throat again, and she swallowed to wash it away. "No, ma'am. I was just thinking."

"Oh?" Umbridge dropped the slipcover and clasped her hands loosely behind her back. "About?" She rocked on the balls of her feet. Toe. Heel. Toe. Heel. A monument that wouldn't quite topple, and the rings clacked in morbid accompaniment. Toe. _Click. _Heel. _Clink._

_Ah, ah, have a care girl. This is where mice and angels fear to tread._

_Men and angels, _she corrected idly.

Her scalp prickled with the weight of Kingsley Shacklebolt's surreptitious gaze, and his hand grew heavier on his shoulder. He was watching, listening. Whatever she said now would be filed away for future reference and carried back to the Headmaster on swift feet. It was a test, too; say too little or speak too cryptically, and arouse suspicion, but speak in haste and remove all doubt. The clammy soles of her feet burned with the illusory pressure of a tightrope.

_Stop looking at me, _she wanted to snarl, but when her mouth opened, she only said, "Faith. And dinner."

Umbridge blinked, and her brow furrowed in consternation. "Faith and dinner," she murmured, nonplussed and not a little irritated. She fisted her hands on her squat hips

Clearly, she thought further elaboration was in order. Rebecca offered none. She sat and beamed at her in beatific silence. The grip on her shoulder eased infinitesimally, and behind Umbridge, Dawlish ceased his inspection of her night table to stare at them in burgeoning bewilderment.

"Faith and dinner," Umbridge repeated for the second time, as if she thought repetition would illuminate the mystery. Her toe tapped an impatient staccato on the stone floor.

Rebecca hummed to herself and began to rock to and fro in her chair, and all the while, she gazed at her adversary with an expression of vacuous serenity. The seat creaked and groaned beneath her in a dreamy, pendulous rhythm, and soon it blended with the clack of Umbridge's rings and the shifting scrape of perused belongings. _Creakclackscrtcreak. Creakclackscrtcreak. _It was hauntingly musical, an eerie symphony of secrets well kept and of dance steps cautiously ventured. A liars' cotillion and the devil's masquerade.

_Yes, but will we unmask at the stroke of midnight, or will the band play on until we have neither strength nor wit and the web of deceit that we have woven strangles us all?_

The thought brought with it not the cold terror she had anticipated, but a heady, whiskey-burn warmth in the pit of her stomach, and adrenaline filled her mouth like sour wine. She could dance until she met her end, dance the Liars' Waltz and the Enemies' Tango until reason fled and the memory of that for which she danced faded into insignificance. Exhaustion would sizzle in her ravaged muscles like acid, and still she would dance. She would lunge and pivot and dip until her enemy faltered, and when the stuporous mantle of too much anguish and too little time overcame them at last, she could surrender to the unending darkness knowing that she had given as good as she got. It would be an honorable death.

_Gone nihilistic again, have you?_ her grandfather grunted. _It's getting to be a habit._

She snorted and slumped in her chair. _Hardly, you miserable old coot. It's just that dying with my teeth buried to the root in that wench's throat and her blood slathered on my chin is much more appealing than wasting away in some wrinkle ranch with rubber diapers and the smell of my own shit stuck to my backside, please and thank you. I'd like to breathe my last with a scrap of dignity._

Her grandfather uttered a sardonic chuckle. _There is no dignity in death, girl. You know that. It is blind in a way justice and all the lofty conceits of man can only envy. Black, white, yellow, rich, poor, hale, infirm-its high, sweet stink pervades them all with equal avarice. The scissors of Atropos are fickle and cut where they will. I lived for seventy-six years and worked my hands to bone and weeping misery, and there was no reprieve for me when my hour came. Your mother found me facedown in the field, one arm flung over the high summer grass and my Sears and Roebuck teeth a few yards away, full of dirt and an industrious colony of ants bent on carrying them to their blind queen in useless tribute. I fought in two wars and fathered four children, and all that counted for a whole lot of nothing in the end. I was just as dead and just as cold as the worthless son of a bitch that never lifted a finger while he was vertical. _

_ At least you were doing something when you died. Like as not, I'll spend my last days strapped into a crazed Barcolounger with tiny wheels and a vinyl seat, sucking applesauce through my left nostril and passing the time by counting the spackle marks on the walls. If I had my druthers, I'd go horizontal after a rare steak and spectacular sex, but barring that, I'll take a death that means something._

Laughter now, and there was an edge of cruelty in it. _I'm telling you for the last time-there is no good death, no expression of noble sentiment as you breathe your last in decorous puffs. It's a sordid, merciless business, blood and phlegm and a death rattle like swamp mud in a percolator. Sour breath and bulging eyes and fingers curled into fists on the bedsheets as they try and cling to this mortal coil for thirty seconds more, one heartbeat more. Death is hard. You know that. I know you do. Or did you really think that Brad left this world with a sigh and flutter of eyelashes?_

His words struck her like a blow, and she flinched. She had tried very hard not to think of her best friend's lonely final hours, hours she had missed because she had chosen that moment to avert her gaze. When she _did_ think about it, she told herself that he had departed for the far shore of the universe borne on the numbing wings of nigh-toxic levels of anesthetic, that he had simply released his tenacious, raw-fingered grip on the edge of the world and let the current bear him away to peaceful shores and untroubled dreams. It was the sole delusion she had permitted herself, and she would have preferred to keep it, but her grandfather's gravelly, relentless voice had torn it apart. The dull throb of a headache was massing behind her eyes, and she brought a trembling index finger to drift back and forth along the crook of her elbow as if to massage it away.

_I don't want to think about it. I'm sure it was brutal and ugly, and I'm also sure that he deserved better, but in order to keep putting one foot in front of the other, I'm going to tell myself that's the way it was. Even high-riding bitches need fairytales from time to time, and that one's mine._

_ All I'm trying to tell you_, the voice said, and in her mind's eye, she could see her grandfather's leathery, tobacco-stained hands raised in a placatory gesture, _is that all death is meaningless. It's what you do in the hours and days between your first breath and your last that matters. No one is going to give a fiddler's fart how you met your Maker, shed tears because you went out with your drawers around your ankles and your ass in the breeze. All they'll give a good goddamn about is whether or not you made your mark while you were here. So, you can battle to the death with Madam Toad all you want; just make sure you clear your Potions Master's name before you do._

_ Thank you for the soliloquy, Grandpa, _she thought wryly.

_Close as I can get to a kick in the ass._

She laughed, a brittle, exhausted sound in the silent room, and Umbridge, who had been surveying her in thin-lipped fury, pounced.

"Do I amuse you, young lady?" she asked shrilly, and one stubby finger shot out to wag furiously, scant inches from her face. "Well," she huffed, "I'll have you know that impeding a Ministry investigation is a severe offense and carries stiff penalties, including imprisonment in Azkaban." Her jowls quivered in indignation.

"No, m-m-," she began. _She looks like a bulldog whose territory has been infringed upon by a rival male with a bigger set._

Oh, _that_ was not a comparison she needed, no sir and no ma'am. She snorted with helpless laughter, her splay-fingered hands clutching her knees with white-knuckled force. It was the worst thing she could do, but it was also the _only _thing she could do. She was too tired and her nerves too frayed to present a stoic front. She lunged forward, and in her mind's eye, she saw two bulldogs regarding each other balefully as they circled in preparation for lethal combat. One lifted a stubby leg and urinated with inscrutable solemnity. _Take that if you can._

She yodeled laughter, and through the din of her mirth, she realized that all other sounds had stopped.

_ It's intermission at the symphony, _she thought nonsensically, and howled.

The laughter had long since ceased to be pleasurable. Indeed, it was an exquisite torture. Her diaphragm expanded and contracted like an overtaxed bellows, and the pleasant burn of welcome exertion had deepened into the serrated-tooth fire of an impending cramp. Her mirth had taken on a desperate, hiccoughing quality, and tears streamed down her scarlet face. The more she tried to stop the lunatic rush of air from her lungs, the more insistent it became, sliding past her clenching, grinding teeth with sinuous, diabolic ease. It had become its own entity, a ravening creature beyond her control. She clapped both hands over her impotent mouth, and still the breathless, choking, _screaming _chortles came.

_You're about to prove an old urban legend, old girl. You're about to die laughing. Any minute now, you're going to topple from your chair and sprawl at Madam Toad's disbelieving feet, dead as a doornail and twice as stiff. Oh, they'll ascribe it to a gran mal seizure or a stroke or an allergic reaction to microscopic dust mites, and after years and a few stiff drinks, Madam Toad might even be able to make herself believe it, but we'll know the truth, you and I. Your quixotic crusade against the smothering Light came to an ignoble end in a puddle of spittle and a black-tongued rictus because you couldn't stop laughing at the image of two bulldogs in a pissing contest._

All of which was certainly true, but it did nothing to quash the laughter still shaking her tiny frame. Nor could the sharp, warning sizzle of the ball of Kingsley Shacklebolt's thumb pressed into the sensitive socket of her shoulder joint. The searing spike of pain raced down her arm in time to her giggles and watery snorts. He wanted her to stop, and she needed to stop, if not for the sake of propriety, then for the sake of her oxygen-starved brain, but needs and wants had temporarily been pushed aside in favor of simple automatic response.

_Professor Snape ground the bones of my shoulder between his fingers once, _she thought with sudden clarity.

"_You_ don't have the right to do that," she snapped, and pulled away with a savage twist of her arm.

And then her heart froze inside her chest. Her eyes darted from the slack-jawed face of Kingsley Shacklebolt to the apoplectic visage of Madam Toad, who was so furious that the air around her crackled with malevolent energy. Her pink cardigan was so bright that Rebecca fought the urge to shield her eyes from the glow, a vulgar neon rheostat on the verge of cataclysmic explosion.

_Please don't let them have heard. Oh, please. _She resisted massaging her forearm by the narrowest of margins. Her appalled fingers curled around the armrests of her chair.

How could she have been so stupid? Her only saving grace was that no one knew what Professor Snape had done in the castle corridor, knew that in his blind, fury, he had coiled his supple, beautiful fingers around her fragile shoulder and ground the delicate joints together in a torturous game of mortar and pestle. No one knew that for three days, she had borne the mark of his hatred against her skin, a shameful brand of midnight black and sunset red. She had kept her part of the bargain, and now, in a moment of unthinking pique, her treacherous mouth had offered up another knot for his noose.

She waited, heart lodged in her throat, for Umbridge to seize the strand of unintended truth in her pudgy, throttling fingers and weave it into the Professor's burial shroud, but Madam Toad said nothing, mercifully deafened by her seething fury. Thirty second passed in utter silence, and all the while, Umbridge stared at her in incredulous, pop-eyed consternation.

Her mouth worked in a futile attempt at speech, and then at last, "Yo-you-_you-,_" Rusty hinges in mournful autumn wind.

The movement was so fast that neither Rebecca nor the Aurors in the room saw it. One moment, Umbridge was glowering at her in whey-faced outrage, and the next, she had darted forward and seized the collar of Rebecca's robes in both hands.

"You impertinent, disrespectful, willful _chit_!" she spat, punctuating each word with a shake of Rebecca's thin shoulders. "You will have respect for this office, and you will have respect for me. For me! Do you understand, you misshapen little brat?" Umbridge was shrieking now, and spittle flew from her mouth to mist on the end of Rebecca's nose.

_I have been anointed. _Then, with dazed amusement, _Don't impertinent and disrespectful mean the same thing? Hey, let's hear it for synonyms._

She opened her mouth to ask Madam Toad precisely that, but each time she tried, another shake would shut her mouth with a click of clashing teeth. The world pitched and yawed above her head with every convulsive jolt, and Umbridge's nails and the gaudy heft of her rings sunk into her flesh like the greedy, diseased talons of a carrion crow. She was terrified-her bladder was a hot, shriveled sac beneath her skin, but she was exhilarated, too. Blood and adrenaline surged through her veins in a heady brew, and the garish pink of Umbridge's cardigan had been transformed into the indolent, rosy haze of sunset. Behind her, the blue of Dawlish's ministerial robes was blinding, and she closed her eyes.

Shacklebolt was doing his level best to prise Umbridge's hands from her shoulders, but flesh had welded to flesh in a bond of clammy-fingered hysteria. Dawlish roused himself from his flummoxed stupor, an open jar of petroleum jelly still clutched in one hand, and rushed to quell the brewing fracas. Rebecca bounced helplessly between them, a hapless rag doll in the clutches of petulant children, and the only thing keeping her in her seat was the black, nylon seat belt that had draped across her thighs since she was old enough to sit up straight.

"Miss Um-Dolores," Kingsley panted, wedging his fingertips between her meaty palm and the fabric of Rebecca's wand, "there is-no need for this."

"Indeed," sniffed Dawlish." His voice was reedy and strangled, and his face wore an expression of surprised affront. "This is most irregular," he added lamely, and seized Madam Toad's wrist.

Umbridge paid neither of them any mind. She was staring at Rebecca with manic intensity, her lips pulled from her teeth in a feral sneer. Her breath wafted against Rebecca's flushed cheek and carried with it the stale odor of bread and bland porridge and the unmistakable, organic smell of wet human mouth, and Rebecca recoiled in distaste.

"Do you hear me, child?" Umbridge hissed, and gave her a vicious shake.

Rebecca did not answer. She was too busy groping for the fat stem of her wand. If she was going to be shaken to bits like a rat in the jaws of a terrier, then she was going to inflict a wound of her own. She was going to live out her fantasy and see a body writhing on the floor at her feet, bowed and jerking as the Cruciatus flayed them by inches with unseen knives. It wasn't an Auror, true, but it was a despised government official, and that was close enough. It would mean her expulsion from school and incarceration in Azkaban, and that was fine, too. Just fine. All that mattered now was inflicting untold agony.

_But what about Professor Snape?_ wailed the voice of conscience inside her head. _You can't just leave him to it._

Oh, but she wouldn't be leaving him to it, not really. With any luck, they have adjoining cells in Azkaban, and as the years passed and the monotony and the isolation stripped away their sanity and their hope with languorous, sadistic relish, they would tap out messages upon the mildewed walls and share clandestine whispers through hairline chinks in the damp stone. As ten years spun inexorably into fifteen and then twenty and dirt-blackened, ragged nails grew from cold, sun-starved flesh, as memory of warmth faded and awareness of self guttered and extinguished, they would rock and croon and serenade one another in the ululating, wailing language of the mad. Parting might be a sweet sorrow, but theirs would not be a long one.

She smiled as she fumbled for her wand with stiff, unruly fingers. It was such a comforting thought, that she might be with him at the end of all things. Her wand danced just beyond her reach, smooth varnish and potent promise. If she could only reach it, then she could mete justice in a wavering arc of the devil's red. Her straining fingertips grazed smooth wood, and for a moment, it was nearly hers, but then Umbridge jerked her forward again, and it slipped from her grasp. She swore, a garbled, unintelligible sound in the back of her throat. She was so very close.

"Do you hear me, child?" Umbridge hissed. She was nearly puce now, and the fingers snarled in Rebecca's robes shook with the desire to throttle or, perhaps, to slap.

Rebecca smiled. "You're touching me." There was no cunning to the statement, no calculated plan. It was simply the first thing that popped into her mind.

There was a thunderstruck silence, and then Umbridge released her grip with an audible creak of tendon and pop of bone. She staggered backward a few paces, overbalancing on one stubby foot for several pinwheeling seconds before finding her center of gravity with an ungainly lurch. She raised her hands to harrow her hair, but then apparently thought better of it, because she scrubbed them on the front of her robes instead.

_Out, out damn spot, _Rebecca thought with bemused detachment.

She was under no illusion that Madam Toad's revulsion had anything to do with her egregious breach of Ministerial protocol. Indeed, it had everything to do with the alarming and irrefutable fact that she, Dolores Umbridge, Grand High Poobah of Upper Buttcrack and All Regions In Between, had not only lost control, but had touched a cripple in the process. Oh, the horror.

_I'm contagious, _she wanted to shriek gleefully. _I'm contagious, and now you're infected. You've caught the Crip._

She said nothing. The adrenaline that had flooded her veins and soaked her bones was already ebbing, leaving her drained and emotionally battered. Besides, shouting something like that at the top of her voice, fun as it may prove at the time, could cause more harm than good. The few Housemates that had befriended her might withdraw, and those that had regarded her with the nascent suspicion of the terminally paranoid would be vindicated by her own lips. Madam Toad would be only too happy to escort her to the infirmary and place her under full quarantine as an ostensible precaution against the spread of crippling disease, and there she would sit, prisoner of her own foolhardy caprice and utterly useless to Professor Snape.

_As if you've been much use to this point, _sneered a vicious little voice inside her head.

_Oh, shut up,_ she thought wearily, and her fingers, which had at long last closed around her wand, relaxed inside the pocket of her robes. _I believe we've already been over this. _She slumped in her chair.

"Are you all right, Miss Stanhope?" Kingsley Shacklebolt's voice, breathless and more than a little bewildered.

She blinked at him in muddled disinterest. _Why in the hell didn't you Stupefy the old cow? _

The wholly justified question trembled on her lips, but she did not ask it. Instead, she muttered, "Mm? Oh, yes, sir. I'm…fine. Just…," she flapped a hand in a loose pantomime of a spinning top. A weak, tremulous laugh.

Shacklebolt eyed her in silent appraisal for a moment, then gave a curt nod. "Perfectly understandable, given the circumstances. I think we've got all we need, anyway. Don't you, Mr. Dawlish?" He looked at his flustered colleague in search of ready agreement.

"What?" Dawlish asked stupidly, and looked from Shacklebolt to his frothing, snorting superior in agonized consternation.

_Deciding which ass to kiss, are you, Dawlish? _Rebecca thought, and reached up to knead a not of tension coiled at the nape of her neck.

"Oh. Yes, right. So I should think," he mumbled, and cast a surreptitious, apologetic glance at Umbridge.

Umbridge, however, was far from amenable. At the mention of abandoning the search, her eyes widened, and she crossed her flabby arms over her chest in stiff-necked defiance.

"I hardly think-," she began, but Kingsley silenced her with an upraised hand.

"With respect, ma'am," he countered mildly, "things have gotten far more heated than is prudent, and no wise decision has ever come from rash behavior. I think it better to postpone further investigation until cooler heads can prevail."

"What if she hides crucial evidence in the meantime?" demanded Umbridge, not to be deterred by logic. She cupped her elbows in her palms and jutted her chin in a counter-that-if-you-can gesture.

Kingsley was only too happy to oblige. "Since we've turned her room inside out twice, I'll wager that the likelihood of that is low, indeed." He paused and tapped his chin with a graceful index finger. "Although," he continued thoughtfully, "I suppose she _could_ be hiding incriminating evidence on or within her person." He nodded. "Yes, I think that's an avenue to be explored. As you are the senior member of the Ministry and the only female present, it falls to you to perform the body and cavity search." He smiled. "Shall I leave you to it, then?" he asked briskly, and started for the door.

Umbridge's color went from mottled plum to sun-bleached whey in the space of seconds, and Kingsley Shacklebolt took his rightful place in the pantheon of future world leaders, right alongside Neville Longbottom, Minister of Magic.

"N-no, no, that won't be necessary," Madam Toad stammered, and retreated several paces from Rebecca, as though she thought she might leap upon her in a sudden fit of madness. She gazed at Rebecca's bony legs in open revulsion, and her fingers rubbed together in dreamy strokes to rid themselves of imagined blight. "No need. It's quite clear that, aside from being truculent, uncooperative, and another in a long line of the Headmaster's pet projects, she has nothing to contribute to our inquiry," she sniffed.

_Judgmental old bitch,_ Rebecca thought furiously, and her hand itched to draw out her wand and wipe the unpleasant smirk from her adversary's face, but sullen Prudence, temporarily unseated by adolescent pique, had reclaimed her throne, and thus, her hand did nothing more than give an indolent scratch to the bridge of her wan nose.

"Right, then," Kingsley said with absurd cheer. "Sorry to have disturbed you, Miss Stanhope." He touched the brim of his wizard's hat in farewell.

She gave a brusque nod of acknowledgment. She did not trust herself to speak. Now that the danger had passed, she felt weak and feverish, and as soon as they had taken their leave, she was crawling into bed and drawing the curtains to shut the world out. She would stay there until supper, or perhaps she would simply lie there in the soft sanctuary of her bed until night drew sable curtains of its own around Hogwarts and the air, sweetened by cold and the last breath of dying grass, crept through chinks in the castle stone to curl around her ankles and dance over her face in a gentle, oddly maternal eddy. Winky would make sure the winsome pink of a slight chill did not deepen to bloodless blue or the deadly, porcelain white of frostbite, and she could lay her cares to rest on the river of dreams and dance in the darkness with the children of Morpheus.

_No, you won't. It's want you want to do and more than likely what you _should_ do, but it's not what you're going to do. As soon as Madam Toad and her merry little retinue hie themselves from this tower, you're going to take your aching bones and your grinding teeth and your clanking, rattletrap wheelchair and pay Professor Moody a visit. He's got to put those charms on, the ones Flitwick gave you that day in Hogsmeade. Because very soon now, either tonight or tomorrow, you're going to see Professor Snape, aren't you?_

The moment the thought crystallized in her mind, she knew it was true. As soon as she could slip away, she was going to steal down to the dungeons and pass the hours in the cold, damp, biting comfort of the dungeons, at the feet of her disgraced professor. She would sit in the sullen silence and listen to the crackle and pop of the torches while he polished his boots or stared listlessly into the empty fire grate. She would offer what scant solace she could and take his scorn in return, sour as wine on her secret-keeper's tongue.

Comforted at the thought of seeing him, all puritanical black and pale, pinched white, she smiled, a furtive flicker in the corners of her mouth. Yes, she would go, and it would be all right. The simple, undeniable weight of his presence would be enough. With his bile and his vitriol and his flailing, impotent rage, he would soothe her scalded soul and rein in the impetuous impulse to break his tormentors. _I am still here, bowed, but not yet broken,_ he would say with every pass of the cleaning chamois, and she would carry the memory of it in the scent of allspice and parchment dust and boot polish that lingered in her nostrils.

Umbridge, who had been stumping to the door with dour, club-footed impatience, paused in her trek and turned to Rebecca. "One last question, dear," she said with careful nonchalance.

"Yes, ma'am?" The tension, which had begun to ebb from her aching muscles, re-established its iron grip, and she grimaced at a sizzling twinge at the base of her spine. Her fingers curled loosely around the armrests of her chair, and the cool silver of the serpent in her sock was cold fire against overheated flesh.

Umbridge took a few loping, predatory steps forward, and now she looked not so much like an angry bulldog as a starving wolf who had scented blood and rot on the wind. The fingers of Rebecca's steering hand twitched with the urge to pull back on the stick and retreat, but there was nowhere to go. The frozen stone was at her back, and she could feel the damp, anesthetizing chill of it through her winter robes. She willed her traitorous hand to relax and stared at Umbridge in mild inquiry.

"I was just wondering, dear," Umbridge mused, and clasped her hands behind her back as she took another inexorable step forward, "what you meant when you told Mr. Shacklebolt that _he _didn't have the right to do that?" So pleasant, and so full of hidden venom.

_So you did hear._

The fledgling serenity in her breast withered, replaced by swooning dread and seething self-reproach. If only she had kept her mouth shut, tucked her chin to her narrow chest and said yay or nay until the tempest passed. It was the sure course of the prudent, and it had served her well over the years. But her anger and her arrogance had made her careless, and the piper had come for his two pence. There was nothing to be done for it but to set her heels, stiffen her spine, and begin the dance anew.

She gritted her teeth behind her closed lips, blinked at Madam Toad in vapid amiability, and said, "Well, he doesn't," as if it were the most obvious conclusion in the world.

Umbridge moved closer still, and from the corner of her eye, Rebecca saw Kingsley Shacklebolt curl his fingers around the door lintel in a mahogany vise. His other hand slithered into the pocket of his robes in search of his wand. Clearly, he anticipated another outburst. Dawlish, too, lingered in the doorway, chewing fretfully on his lower lip. He stepped forward as if to intervene, then thought better of it. One hand came up in supplication, but when Umbridge did not acknowledge the gesture in the slightest, he ran his fingers through his hair and let his arm drop

_The bloodletting is over for today. She's done all the shouting and cursing she's going to. Losing her temper in front of her inferiors was the last thing she wanted, and she won't make that mistake again. This is just dancer's etiquette, her way of letting me know she'll be back. Nothing to fear. Just the feint and dip._

But she was afraid, and the fear lodged in the back of her throat in a hot, slick, sour ball. Madam Toad was arrogant and vicious, but she was also sly and patient as her secret moniker. She smelled the truth behind the lie, sensed it on the periphery of her vision, and she meant to unearth it if she could.

Still another step, and less than three paces stood between them. This close, the sweet, cloying musk of Umbridge's lavender perfume turned to the boiled-blood stink of old corruption in her nostrils. The desire to flee was an overwhelming compulsion, and her feet, undeterred by the cold, hard truth of six feet of implacable Scottish stone behind her back, scrabbled and scuttled on the worn plastic of her footrests in a futile bid for precious distance. God help her, she wanted _away._

_Trapped, I'm trapped,_ she thought wildly, and the reek of dead flowers made her gorge spasm in protest. _Rabbit in a snare, that's what I am, and there is no valiant Neville Longbottom to save the day this time. The wolf draws ever closer._

"Well?" Umbridge trilled, and her livery lips pulled into a triumphant, lupine leer.

Rebecca's mutinous feet backpedaled in short, jerky half-steps, and she hated them. They belied her lie. She curled her hands into tight fists and tried to swallow, but her uncooperative throat clenched and sent a thick clot of spittle from her mouth in a warm, viscous spray. She raised her fist to her lips and swiped at the thick streamer of saliva on her chin.

_No way out. Any lie you tell will be betrayed by the errant twitches of your body. The dance is almost at an end now. Round and round we go; where we stop, we soon shall know._

_There is a way. There is always a way. Death is the only absolute in this world, and you've got a sight more to go before we reach that particular bend in the road. Think, girl. There is nothing too crass, no sacred cow. Use whatever you have to and worry about the consequences in the morning. There is no dirty fighting anymore. It's survival of the fittest, or, in this case, survival of the most ruthless. Sink or swim._

For a moment, nothing came to mind. Her bag of tricks and artful manipulations was empty. And then…

She smiled at her own artifice.

_What I won't do… Oh, the cleverness of me._

"Yes, ma'am," she answered in a strained, tremulous voice. "I meant-."

She grunted and pitched forward in her chair, and her hands opened and closed in an arrhythmic snap. A fingernail broke to the quick, and she snarled at the brief flare of pain and the bright bead of blood that dripped from her fingertip. Her feet drummed a discordant staccato against the thin plastic of her footrest and the solid titanium of the wheelchair frame. She lurched upright again, fingers rigid talons against her palm, and arched, her back bowed at an impossible, Lovecraftian angle. A liquid, vibrato groan issued from within her chest, and in a final perverse touch, her bladder let go with a warm hiss.

_What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jee-sus,_ sang a soft chorus inside her head, and she bit the inside of her cheek to stifle lunatic laughter. _No shame. No shame now. Dignity is nothing more than a commodity. Sell it if you have to._

"Hngh blot," she grunted, her eyes wide with unspeakable anguish. _Even in the throes of this fit, I'm trying to obey you, Miss Umbridge. See what a good girl am I?_ Another throttled wheeze of laughter.

Umbridge gaped at her in dim incredulity, and beneath the surprise flickered another emotion, uglier and truer. Fear. Not that she had possibly done grievous injury to a student, but that along with her temper, she had also lost her vaunted position as right hand to the Minister of Magic. Years of toil and backstabbing and shameless social climbing, gone, lost with a single shake of her wrist. In her wide, confounded eyes danced visions of inquiry and dismissal and penniless ignominy as the Woman Who Had Abused A Child. She saw the scalding brand of public opinion, and she shied from it.

"Miss Stanhope! Miss Stanhope, stop this at once. I demand it!" she ordered, but her voice was tremulous, devoid of its usual brisk authority, and she was none too steady on her feet as she lurched forward, hand extended toward Rebecca's shoulder as though to steady it.

Whatever she had intended, she never got the chance to put it into action because Kingsley Shacklebolt shoved her aside with teeth-clacking force.

"Bloody hell!" he swore, as he skidded to a stop in front of her chair. "Miss Stanhope, can you hear me? It will be all right." His hands tugged furiously at her lap belt as he spoke. "Dammit." The belt slithered from his frantic grasp, an unknowing co-conspirator in her desperate ruse.

Her hot, clawed hand scrabbled at his wrist, and she willed him to look at her. She could not stop the charade, not for love or money, but she did not want him to be afraid. Indeed, she wanted his help. He had to understand, and when the drama was over, he had to bring Professor Moody.

"Yes," he soothed as he wrenched the belt free. "Yes, it's all right." He was almost whispering now.

She shook her head, as much denial as false convulsion. "Nnnn-nnn," she moaned, and spittle flew from her lips.

He scooped her from her chair, and her nose was filled with the scent of starch, fresh linen, and old woodsmoke. It was not entirely unpleasant. Then he was moving, sprinting toward the door, Umbridge and Dawlish following in his wake like befuddled sheep. Out the door and down the stairs, past a sea of curious faces. It was now or never.

She seized the collar of his robes and tugged. "M'ster. Shak'bolt," she slurred, and this time, he did look at her.

"Yes?" Soft as breath, detectable only by the imperceptible movement of his lips.

She smiled. _Moody,_ she mouthed, and then she went limp in his arms.

Before she closed her eyes, she could have sworn she saw him laugh.

Rebecca Stanhope was weaving a noose of her own.


	48. To Save Mine Enemy Until the Day of Reck...

Chapter Forty-Eight

The first time Alastor Moody had walked these halls, both his legs had been his own, and he had not counted off the paces by the solid _thunk _of mahogany on stone. To skip and to run were as effortless as the drawing of breath, and the brilliant, high-summer plumage of youth had not dulled to the weary dun of hard-bought pragmatism. Anything had still been possible then, within his eleven-year-old grasp, and he could vividly recall kicking Darius Stebbett in the shins with the heel of his right foot.

A wry smile twisted his scarred, leathery face as he laboriously dragged himself up the second-floor staircase, planting his walking stick on the riser in front of him before each ponderous step. It wouldn't do for him to go arse over battered teakettle down the stairs, even if no one was there to see it except Kingsley Shacklebolt. He could be called a crackpot and a barmy old codger until the world stopped spinning, but he'd be damned if he'd add cack-handed fool to his list of shortcomings. It was already plenty long enough, and besides, he wouldn't want to infringe upon Nymphadora Tonks' purview. Whatever else he was, he was a gentleman.

He laughed, a rusty, guttural caw, and Kingsley quirked an eyebrow, an uncertain smile dancing on his lips.

"Something funny?" he asked.

"Just thinking," Moody answered gruffly, and pulled his wooden peg up another step.

Funny that he should remember that after all these years. At well past eighty and after nearly forty years as an Auror, he had thought he was well past maudlin indulgence in old memories.

_Ex-Auror, _an officious little voice inside his head reminded him, and he snorted.

There was no such thing as an ex-Auror. Oh, they could strip you of your credentials, force you into early retirement, and insult you with a disingenuous farewell party full of false, strained smiles and stale cake, but they could not confiscate your memories or your training; once you became an Auror, an Auror you remained until they lowered you into the ground or consigned your earthly remains to the indifferent maw of the belching crematorium. It wasn't so much a job as an occupational transubstantiation.

Nor could they erase the fact that, on a torpid July night twenty years ago, he'd sacrificed his right leg-the very leg that had once kicked Darius Stebbett in one lean shin-to job and Ministry. He had bid a screaming adieu to his shin, foot, and five little piggies in a nauseating flash of bilious orange, and the next morning, he had awakened to the dismal realization that phantom pains and a thick length of mahogany were to be his companions forevermore.

As if they had followed the thread of his thoughts, the stiff leather bindings that bound flesh to insensate wood creaked and chafed the callused, puckered skin of his stump. He grimaced and stopped to adjust the cumbersome harness.

Kingsley, too, stopped. "All right, Alastor?" He reached out a steadying hand.

Moody shook him off with an irritable snarl. He didn't need to be mollycoddled like some doddering invalid. "I'm fine," he snapped, and dug one horny finger between stump and offending strap.

Kingsley stepped back and raised his hands in a conciliatory gesture. "Fair enough," he said amiably, and dipped his chin in acquiescence.

A disgruntled harrumph was Moody's only reply. You didn't need to be an Auror to know that was Civiltongue for, _All right, you crotchety old bastard. I'll be damned if I'll give you a reason to send me tumbling down these stairs._ Like his contemporaries and the young berks now entering the ranks of the Aurors, Kingsley had no doubt heard the legendary tales of Mad Eye Moody that still circulated around the office water carafe, and he, for all his politeness, clearly thought him mad as a March hare.

_Course he does. He hasn't seen. Not but in his fifties, and full of the arrogant complacency of the perennially unchallenged. He hasn't forgotten the lessons of the first War against Voldemort-you can never forget-, but the screams of the dying do not ring so loudly in his ears now, and the putrescent stench of loose bowels and sizzling blood and rotten flesh no longer clings to his nostrils in perverse parody of a lover's perfume. Years and foolhardy optimism have blunted his sense of danger, and even as the storm clouds gather round him, he still hopes that it will not come to that._

He wasn't around for Grindewald, either, and some of the things I've seen there would have sent him screaming into the land of gibbering insanity. If Voldemort is a menacing shadow, then Grindewald was the solar eclipse, only he didn't just blot out the sun; he strangled it. Half the Auror patrols sent out against Grindewald's army never came back, and those that did carried the more fortunate half home again in pieces. His arrogance stems from his blessed ignorance, and I only rue that it cannot last.

The recalcitrant strap finally slipped into place with a petulant rasp against irritated flesh, and he stumped up the next step with an indignant huff. Damn leg was as much hindrance as help. The hand not fisted around his walking stick in a tenacious, white-fingered grip came up to scratch the bridge of his nose.

_Ah, another trophy from bygone days, _crowed the cynical voice inside his head. _Most men commemorate their heroism with metals and plaques, but you, you carry the proof of your deeds on your very face. Never one for pretension._

He grimaced as he moved inexorably upward. He'd lost that chunk of nose in a frantic duel with fleeing Death Eaters a little over a year after Lily and James Potter, darlings of the resistance movement, had been reduced to charred skeletons in the rubble of their home. In truth, the loss of the bridge of his nose and the acquisition of the patchwork of scars that adorned his narrow, watchful hatchet face had angered him more than the loss of his leg. The leg, at least, could be hidden under voluminous folds of robes. There was no hiding his ravaged face.

_But that's not really why you're angry, is it? With whom can you be truthful if not yourself? Your leg was an honest casualty, lost because someone was quicker on the draw than you. But your nose…ah, your nose was an eternal reminder of your carelessness. You got cocky. You were an Auror, and your quarry were young boys fresh out of these very halls. You underestimated them, and the price for your blithe insouciance was the flesh from your nose. You never repeated that mistake, but you never forgave it, either, and every morning, you gaze into and through the mirror and remember that once, just once, constant vigilance wasn't enough._

He swore under his breath and quickened his pace, robes clutched in one gnarled hand. Now was not the time to be thinking of things long dead, reopening old wounds to fester. His leg and the flesh from his nose had returned to the dust from whence they had come, and no amount of taciturn eulogizing would bring them back. Nor would it change the fact that his glory days as an Auror were behind him.

_I made my peace with that long ago, _he assured himself as the round, wooden butt of his leg crested the third-floor landing.

_Bollocks you have, _sneered the voice of unvarnished truth. _Delusion does not become you, Alastor, and yet you persist in this one. The loss of your job was a far deeper blow than the loss of your flesh. Your nose and your leg were just mortal trappings, frescoes and bas relief on Temple Moody, but being an Auror, well, that defined who you were. Auror wasn't just your job title; it was your true surname, and you cherished it more than the life you were gifted. You loved it so much that you plucked out thine eye in its name. You never forgave them for tossing you out like garbage when they were through with you, an old warhorse sent, not to stud in some bucolic, green pasture, but to the proverbial glue factory, tarred forever with the whispered insinuation of madness. The very histrionic prudence they taught you became your fatal flaw._

A gargling snort and the ponderous thump of his wooden leg as he ascended another step. There was a sizzling, darning-needle stitch in his side, and his hand was numb from clutching his walking stick so tightly, but he was damned if he would take a break, much as he might need one. While Kingsley was no smirking, snot-nosed berk fresh from Auror training and still convinced that winning or losing was determined by the size and turgidity of one's pecker, he was still young enough to pity the creeping infirmities of the aged with the well-intended insouciance of youth. His mouth was sandpaper dry, and he longed for a generous pull from his silver hip flask, but it was tucked carefully inside the voluminous folds of his robes and therefore beyond his reach. When he got to the landing, then.

He spared Kingsley a sidelong glance as the walked. Not much had change since he'd first lain eyes on him as an optimistic recruit thirty years ago, when he-Alastor-had still been a respected leader of men and the fight against Voldemort had still been an escalating skirmish. His skin was as smooth as ever, devoid of wrinkles or even the minute crows' feet that laid claim to the corners of the mouth after forty. His pate was smooth beneath his wizard's hat, and he walked with the same thoughtful tread that had so attracted his notice all those years before.

And yet, there _were_ subtle changes, minute details that the unaware would never have noted. It was in the eyes, mostly, a dull weariness and inveterate wariness that he was sure had not been there before, the burden of unwanted knowledge. They all came by it sooner or later, to the last man. It was an unspoken consequence of the job, one carefully omitted from the glossy pamphlets distributed to starry-eyed students in their fifth and seventh years. For some, the change came slowly, like tarnish on silver or the formation of cataracts, bought hard by seeing more than you wanted to and doing not nearly enough. For others, it came in a single, calamitous moment. However it came, once they earned it, it was theirs forever.

_Yours came quickly, in a single roundhouse slap that extinguished your already guttering optimism like a candle flame pinched between callused fingers. The little girl at the Shaughnessy house your fourth year on the job. Little more than a baby, really. The sight of her lying in the soggy rubble of her house while the rain fell into her glazed, opaque, blue eyes and the flies crawled inside her nostrils disabused you forever and always of the notion that man was inherently good. You never trusted anyone again. Not even yourself._

He swore under his breath and hobbled toward the right side of the stairs and the solidity of the damp castle wall with grim resolve. Shacklebolt or not, it was time for a damn drink.

"Knut for your thoughts?" Kingsley asked companionably, and stepped aside to let him pass.

"I'll give you two Knuts to mind your own," he muttered gruffly, and collapsed against the cool stone with the blunted, echoing crack of wood on stone. Panting, he groped for his flask, which was lodged against the leathery, wattled crag of his hip.

Kingsley merely inclined his head and offered him a polite, enigmatic smile.

Moody snorted and curled his fingers around the smooth silver of the flask. It was cold and reassuring in his hand, and after a bit of ill-tempered fumbling and muttered imprecations, he pulled it from his robes, unscrewed the cap with impatient fingers, and took a deep, grateful pull. The familiar warmth of Ogden's Firewhiskey bloomed inside his chest and burned away the image of a little, blonde girl with frosted china eyes whose charred, ruined face sloughed off in the cold January drizzle.

"You don't smile much anymore, Kingsley, not the way you used to," he said as he replaced the cap on his hip flask and wiped his chin on the sleeve of his robes.

That enigmatic smile again, and Kingsley leaned against the wall, one hand stuffed into the pocket of his robes and his ankles crossed. It was a relaxed, aloof posture, but Moody knew his fingers were curled around the shaft of his wand. It was the stance of a well-trained Auror.

"Don't I?" Kingsley replied softly. A gentle shrug and a wry laugh. He said nothing else.

Moody replaced his hip flask and pushed away from the wall, leaning heavily against his walking stick. "So, I'm to see Miss Stanhope, am I?" he said after an awkward pause. There was no point in pursuing the previous avenue of thought any further. A man was entitled to keep his secrets, after all, and Merlin knew he had enough of his own to tend without dredging up another's.

_Funny, _sneered a contemptuous voice inside his head, _you were never possessed of such circumspection before. Oh, my, no! As a matter of fact, you took a perverse-some would say unhealthy-delight in breaking men's minds and riffling through their closely guarded secrets like a ham-fisted thief. It was your sordid entertainment, and you were hardly particular in your methods. Behind the locked doors and Silencing wards of the Ministry interrogation rooms, there was no one to hear the screams and raise the cry. Rules of decency need not apply. No Curse was too vile, no physical torture too heinous. You snapped bones and sanity with equal facility, and you gloated over every confession you tore from bloody, shock-numbed lips like priceless treasure. You still think about it now and then, when the shadows grow long and the walls close in._

_Everything I did was done in the name of protecting my world,_ he snarled at the implacable voice, and his arthritic hip creaked and throbbed with exertion as he quickened his pace. The fourth-floor landing was close at hand.

_You didn't enjoy it, then?_

_Of course I did. It was my chance to avenge the helpless. Tit for tat. Those bastards deserved everything they got, and I'll not apologize for a whit of it._

A sardonic, rasping chuckle, rusty hinges in November wind. _Methinks thou dost protest too much. And even if you speak the truth, there is someone here who would disagree. Two, actually, if you count Dumbledore. Determined as he is to stop Voldemort, I think he would turn away and shudder at the deeds done in the name of balancing the scales, and so do you, else you would have boasted freely of them. Ah, but the one, as to him there can be no doubt. He was younger and weaker then, and he never forgave you for the trespasses committed in that bare room._

_I don't need forgiveness from his kind. Reformed or not, what he was taints what he is, and if he or Dumbledore expects me to don the ashes and sackcloth and grovel for absolution on bended knee, they'll be waiting a long time. _He was dimly aware of Kingsley speaking to him, probably answering his question, but it was little more than a distant hum.

_No, perhaps not, _conceded the voice with a disingenuous purr. _But you've never forgiven him for refusing to break. Oh, he screamed and arched and pissed his robes and trousers like all the rest, but you could never stamp out the defiance in his eyes, erase the subtle hauteur from that gaunt, pale face. Even wallowing in his own cooling piss, he knew he was better than you, and he yielded absolutely nothing beneath your lash, not even when you took the lowest road of all and tortured his exposed genitalia. To this day, he still has that same unspoken surety, that slinking smugness, and it galls you to no end. It always will._

"Professor Moody?" A hand grazed his forearm.

He started and wheeled to face Kingsley with an ungainly lurch. "What is it?" he snapped, and his magical eye fixed on him with undisguised irritation.

Kingsley was singularly unfazed by this display of pique. "I said," he answered mildly, "that Miss Stanhope asked for you specifically as I was carrying her to the infirmary."

"Did she, now?" he grunted noncommittally.

Kingsley nodded. "I'm not certain why."

Moody thought for a moment. "What happened during that search?"

Kingsley sighed. "Merlin only knows." He pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. "Everything was going well, and then Umbridge, for reasons known only to herself, grabbed the girl by the shoulders and started frothing about respect for the office of the Ministry."

Something that might have been amusement escaped Moody's lips. "Bunch of rot, that."

"After that, she started shaking her. Dawlish and I prised her off, but just as we were leaving, Umbridge turned and asked Stanhope what she'd meant by an earlier comment."

"Shaking her?" Moody said sharply. "And she still has a job? I believe I was dismissed for less."

"Yes, sir, shaking her," Kingsley answered, tactfully sidestepping the issue of Moody's dismissal. "Then Dolores asked the question, and the girl just…," he trailed off as he searched for the mot juste, "…pitched a fit," he said finally, though it was clear from both his expression and the tone of his voice that the phrase was hardly apt for what had happened.

Moody filed that away for future reference. "Did she ever answer the question?" His beady magical eye leered knowingly at his companion.

"No, as a matter of fact, she didn't."

"Mmm."

He had expected as much. Interesting as the altercation in the Gryffindor girls' dormitory between Umbridge and Dumbledore's latest pubescent crusader was, his mind returned inexorably to the interrogation rooms of yore and the stiff-necked boy he could not break.

To this day, he was unsure how much his old friend Albus Dumbledore knew or suspected about what had transpired within those walls between his old and trusted ally and his newest trophy in the fight against the Dark Lord, and it was very likely he never would. By the time Albus returned for his charge two days later, the visible bruises and all the breaks had been mended, and if he noticed that the hook-nosed, greasy-haired, skinny young man could barely stand for his weariness and walked with an uncharacteristic shambling, hunched gait, he made no sign.

_Not quite true, that. There was that one piercing look as he turned to leave, hard as frost and scathing as Arctic wind. He knew you too well, and you did not have to name your sins for him to know them. The illicit stink of your exhilaration was still on your skin, just as the stink of old urine and sweat clung to a twenty-year-old Severus Snape. Even if it hadn't, he would have known anyway; he was Albus. Rebuke in a single glance, and then he was gone with a majestic sweep of his robes. He never said a word. He didn't have to. And because it was easier to believe that he knew nothing rather than acknowledge that you had disappointed him, you buried your head in the sand and told yourself that your secret was safe, but you knew better, and you're too old for denial and games now._

_It was my job, _he protested furiously, _and I intended to do it, Albus Dumbledore's approval be damned. _The fourth-floor landing was so near now, and he cursed his lumbering gait and contrary joints. If he could just gain the landing, he could banish this unpleasant train of thought and focus on the business of Rebecca Stanhope, but thirty feet seemed three hundred, and his steps drew him no closer.

_He was there of his own volition to confess, lay bare his every atrocity, and he did, in unflinching detail. He told you everything without so much as a flinch or a pause in that flawless diction. For three hours, that soft, smooth baritone enumerated the pleasures of the damned, and you listened, spellbound and appalled. And when he was done and that mesmerizing voice had fallen silent, you tortured him to within an inch of his life._

I had to be sure there wasn't more. For every crime the likes of him confessed, there were at least a dozen more to which they never spoke. A Death Eater gives nothing freely, and he never truly repents. That was one of the first things we learned in Auror training, and one of the truest.

_You could have used Veritaserum, _the voice persisted, and there was malicious glee in it now. _It would have been more humane, at least, if just as unethical. There was no need to break his fingers one by one or apply a Stinging Hex to his genitals._

He said nothing. There was nothing _to _say. What was done was done, and he had lost sleep over none of it. Four steps to go before he reached the fourth-floor landing and the invisible line of demarcation between past and present. He planted his walking stick with a defiant grunt. From the corner of his non-magical eye, he saw Kingsley's lips purse in contemplation, but the younger Auror made no comment.

_You could have been merciful, _the voice continued as though there had been no interruption. _But you didn't want to be. You wanted him to suffer. Every dry-kindling snap of his phalanges, every scream you tore from his throat while he writhed on the floor and clawed at the cold stone floor with nails scraped to the bleeding, ragged quick was a measure of justice meted out by your hand, and after eighteen unyielding hours beneath your wand, he still had not begun to pay a tenth of what he owed. You had been to some of the places he had mentioned, you see. You had seen the carnage he left in his wake, carried out the bodies and consoled the grieving families. And now, here it was, a chance to even the scales. And you took it._

Three steps. A grim smile spread over his mutilated face. Of course he had, and he had enjoyed every second of it, even if the arrogant prick had never broken. It had given him an almost erotic pleasure to watch him contort and flail, shrieking while spittle flecked his cheeks and glistened on his chin, and sometimes, he still dreamt of it and woke to find a leaden heat in his balls. At least one of the murderous sons of bitches had been made to taste a bit of his own gall.

Two steps.

_And yet the Fates have not lost their enduring love of irony. Seventeen years later, Dumbledore, the congenial benefactor of wayward souls, has called upon you to help clear a name sullied beyond redemption. The boy you could not break has become a bitter, tortured man who would kill you if he could. He has not forgotten the old hurts, and he has nursed them on his festering hatred like misbegotten children. Sometimes when you're eating at the High Table, the weight of his gaze settles on the back of your head, and it occurs to you that the only obstacle between you and his furious vengeance is human flesh, and you know all too well what a pitiful barrier it makes. The food turns to ash in your mouth, and you are not so smug then, are you? Because you know that he would have no compunction whatsoever about smothering you in your bed. You had your retribution in that squalid little room, and one day, he will have his, and bastard though he is, he was never one to leave a job unfinished._

One step.

The voice, cruel as it was, spoke the undeniable truth. He had no doubt that there would be a reckoning between himself and Severus one day, a settling of old scores and the opening of old wounds. Too much had passed between them for any hope of a mutual détente. He was too paranoid, and Severus was too bitter to let bygones be bygones, and so they waited and circled one another with wary, interminable patience, praying for the day the stability of their world no longer depended upon their cooperation.

He gained the fourth floor at last, and a sigh of relief escaped him. The old memories could not reach him here, supplanted as they were by new concerns and the promise of a meeting with Hogwarts' shriveled little sibyl. His tread lightened, and the breath did not sit so heavily in his lungs. The infirmary came into view, gleaming mahogany doors that separated the living from the dying, and there she waited, a denizen of both lands but a citizen of neither. Cobalt blue eyes and sunfire hair danced behind his eyes, and he blinked them away.

"What do you know of her?" he asked gruffly.

Kingsley cocked his head. "Sir?"

"What's she like, boy?" he demanded impatiently. "Is she mad, like that Ravenclaw misfit?" His gnarled thumb and forefinger came together in a futile snapping motion. "Luna Lovegood, that one is."

"Oh. Having never met Miss Lovegood, I can't say for certain, but if you're asking if Miss Stanhope is crazy, I'd have to say no. Bitter and defensive and more than a little paranoid, but perfectly sane."

"That Lovegood is absolutely crackers," Moody assured him. "Crumple-Horned Snorkacks, my arse. Wastes half my lessons with her incoherent piffle. I'd wager someone's been slipping something into her food. Feckless, foolhardy little twits never think twice about sharing food, despite the fact that not even Merlin knows where it's been. Think they're invincible, they do."

"I'll trust your assessment," Kingsley answered drily.

Moody spared him a baleful glance. "Are you being smart?"

"Not at all, sir. Isn't Stanhope in your lessons?"

She was. And she had never missed a lesson. Her homework was neat and concise, and she had never been disrespectful or spoken out of turn. She kept her eyes to the front and her mouth shut, and on the rare occasion she had a question, she raised her spindly hand and waited to be called upon. He had even grown accustomed to her Dicta-Quill as it scratched its way across her parchment. In short, she was a model student.

And yet…

There was something about her that unnerved him, made the spittle sour in his mouth and his scrotum shrivel beneath his robes whenever she looked at him. It wasn't her disability-he had seen manglings and mutations uncounted during his stint as an Auror, and he was hardly a statuesque tribute to beauty. It was a deeper malaise, a taint that winnowed beneath her too-pale flesh and seethed through her very marrow. She was not so much a young girl as a changeling trying desperately to mimic that which it did not comprehend. Sometimes she looked at him while he lectured, and it was all he could do not to cram his fist into his mouth and scream or bellow at her not to look at him, damn it all. Neither was a sensible course of action for a man trying to prove his sanity to a disbelieving world, and so he held his tongue and pretended not to notice that avid gaze, and the end of the lesson could never come soon enough.

_It's the eyes. _The voice was back, but there was no cynicism in it now, only uneasy honesty. _They're pretty, as pretty as she is ugly, but they're also as pitiless and dead as the eyes of a Greek bust. You can stare at her for ten minutes, and that blankness never changes. Her mouth moves, and she follows your movement around the room, but those china-doll eyes are a thousand miles away, in a place and time you can neither comprehend nor touch, looking for something only she can see. She can see out, but you can't see inside, and that scares you._

_It's not just the eyes, _he amended. _It's the way she smiles. That sly, Mona Lisa smirk that never reaches her eyes. It's there and gone in a single breath, but it lingers in memory long after it has faded from that skeletal face. It is the mischievous smile of a child who knows the secrets kept behind closed doors and understands the muffled Morse code of bedsprings after dark. She knows more than she ought, and you have this terrible, swooning suspicion that she knows it about you._

All of which was preposterous rot. She was a fifteen-year-old girl, not a mysterious cipher who saw the darkest sins of man and numbered them from greatest to least. Her eyes and her smirk were nothing more than the artifice of the young, designed to project confidence where none existed and unbalance him, and he was furious at himself for letting it succeed so completely. He was so disgusted with his uncharacteristic fit of the screaming meemies that he threw the infirmary doors open with far more force than he had intended, and the resultant reverberating crash echoed through the cavernous room, the distant rumble of thunder.

Madam Pomfrey looked up with a scowl. "I'll thank you to remember that this is an infirmary, Alastor," she said tartly, and resumed her turning of the mattresses with an irritated harrumph.

His tongue burned with an acid retort, but he quelled it with a Herculean effort. One look at her pinched face and bruised eyes was enough to tell him that Poppy Pomfrey was ten thousand leagues from all right, and the last thing she needed was a blazing row over Hospital Wing etiquette. Instead, he squared his shoulders, touched his fingers to the brim of his wizard's hat and said. "Right, Madam Pomfrey. Where is she?"

Pomfrey gave a brusque nod to the corner where Harry Potter lay covered to the chin by starched hospital linens. "Over there." Her expert hands plumped a pillow that had little need of it and tugged a stubborn crease from fresh bed linens. "She seems all right now, though she was dodgy for a while." Hands tucked corners and smoothed sheets

He saw with no surprise whatsoever that she was propped in the bed beside Potter's, and he was equally unsurprised to note that she was watching him with those lightless blue eyes, her mouth set in a thin, expressionless line. He stumped grimly forward, pulled up a chair, and sat with a graceless flop.

"Miss Stanhope," he growled, and reached for his hip flask.

She gave an almost imperceptible nod, and her hands twitched on the coverlet like stunned, albino spiders. "Professor Moody." Slow and slurred.

His brow furrowed. That was odd. She spoke little in lessons, but when she did, it was concise and perfectly intelligible. "Suffer a blow to the head, did you?"

"Sir?" She gazed at him in serene befuddlement, as if he were quite mad, and all the while, her fretful hands fluttered over the coverlet.

_Being coy, are you?_ he thought furiously, and took a defiant swig from his flask.

"There is no alcohol in the infirmary, Professor," Pomfrey chided from behind him.

"Bollocks there isn't," he snorted. "You've a whole supply chest full of it."

"Of a different sort altogether, and well you know it," she huffed.

He nodded. "Aye, and I'll wager my magical eye you've got a bottle of Ogden's in your desk drawer."

There was a considering pause. "Spill one drop, and, professor or not, you'll be on your knees with a bucket and a scrub brush. I'll not have this infirmary reeking like a grubby tavern."

"On my knee, Pomfrey," he corrected gruffly, but there was a glint of wry mirth in his non-magical eye. "I seem to be missing one."

Pomfrey muttered something that bore an uncanny resemblance to, _and most of your mind,_ and retreated to her office, leaving the door ajar, lest one of her patients or the trio of Aurors clustered in the corner opposite Potter's bed like overeager carrion crows summoned her, and he returned his attention to Stanhope, who had observed the riposte without a word.

"Well, what did you need, Stanhope?"

She ran her fingers through her hair and dropped her hand to the coverlet once more. "Headmaster Dumbledore told me to contact you if I ever needed help putting things in order," she said quietly.

The subtle emphasis she placed on the word _order_ was not lost on him. His left eye narrowed, and his magical eye spun lazily in its socket. "Ah. Did he now?" Another thoughtful pull from his flask. "What did you need?" He leaned forward, and the chair gave a somnolent creak.

"I was wondering if you had a chance to come up with those extra-credit spells we had discussed. You know, for theoretical purposes." Her gaze drifted to the Aurors shuffling from foot to foot at the edge of Harry's bed.

"I'm afraid you'll have to refresh my memory, Miss Stanhope. It's been rather busy of late, and I can be distracted easily."

There was a surreptitious snigger from the youngest Auror, who was unsuccessfully trying to hide his amusement behind a fisted hand.

_Arrogant little shit. I was fighting Dark wizards long before you were a tightness in your father's bollocks, _he thought venomously, and resisted the urge to fork his fingers at his smug face.

"Of course, sir," she said, and her hands ceased their constant flutter. "It concerns the Charms commonly employed by the assassins' guilds in the Middle Ages. I'm told stealth was a requisite."

"If you didn't want to get your arse blown up, it was," he muttered absently.

He had never discussed the medieval assassins' guilds with any of his pupils. That was N.E.W.T.-level material, if it were covered at all, but he knew what she was asking of him well enough. Concealment. The right to move about as she would, unfettered by watching eyes. If he acquiesced, she would become one with the creeping shadows, undetectable save by a few. She would glide on silent wheels, collector of bones and midnight sins, and the thought made him acutely uncomfortable. He shifted in his chair and sought the reassuring heft of his walking stick.

"You don't plan on using any of them do you?" he asked in what he hoped was a tone of sardonic humor.

A strangled chuff. "No, sir. That magic is a bit beyond me." She held up her frail hands by way of explanation.

_Bollocks._ "Just so we're clear."

He sat back. So there it was. All these years and all of Dumbledore's clever machinations, and from the mouths of babes was his transformation from righteous persecutor to abettor wrought. He stared at her.

_You could refuse. It is your right. ___

He could, but he wouldn't. He knew that much even as the mutinous thought took shape in his mind. Not because he feared Dumbledore's wrath or because he was an old man growing older by the day, but because to refuse would be to admit that he was ruled by his hatreds and his paranoid suppositions. It would mean he was like Severus, and that he could not abide. As vicious and loathsome as Snape was, he was still integral to the Order, and he would not endanger all that so many better men had died for in the name of personal vendetta.

_But when this War is over…_

He looked at them both, Dumbledore's child-champions. Harry, sweet and eager to please, a child born and likely to die in the name of the Light, crumbling beneath the weight of the interminable weight he carried. His cheeks were sunken and grey, and he could see the emaciated jut of collarbone even through the starched linens that covered him like a shroud. The boy had been vital once, strong and full of hope, and now he was wasting away beneath the dispassionate gaze of government officials that viewed him as little more than a living weapon.

And then there was Stanhope, a child of the netherworld between darkness and light, not yet bound by Dumbledore's golden tether. She gazed at him with dull equanimity, and her hands danced upon the bed linens with oddly compelling grace.

He leaned forward in his chair and laced his fingers together between his legs. These words were hers and hers alone.

"Do you know what he is, child?"

Her brow creased, and he could see the wheels turning in her head. Finally, she shook her head. "No," she admitted, "I don't. But neither do you."

He scoffed. "Smug chit, aren't you?" He pressed his palms against his knee, his leathery face stern and forbidding. "It's always the same with you kids. Get twelve years or so under your belt and think you've solved the mysteries of the universe. I've known him since he was a skinny whelp. I assure you I know him a sight better than you, girl."

"Maybe, but everybody has many faces, and only God sees them all." She cocked her head, and a mischievous smirk played at the corners of her mouth. "Which one did you see, Professor?"

_The darkest one. _"Never you mind," he said gruffly, and rose with a grunt. Then, voice raised so his next words carried to the ears of curious Aurors. "If you'd like to discuss the medieval assassins' guilds, I'll be in my office at seven o'clock tomorrow."

She opened her mouth to protest.

"I've no patience for layabouts, Stanhope. Your beauty sleep is not my concern. If it's important to you, you'll be there. If not, don't waste my time."

"Yes, sir."

The words emerged with a trace of teenage petulance, and she eyed him with sullen impatience. It made him inexpressibly glad to see her subtle pique. It meant that she was indeed flesh and bone and adolescent entitlement beneath her pasty skin and gargoyle's face, not an unflappable dybbuk in human form.

"Good day, Stanhope," he growled as he stumped toward the door, and the smile that crossed his craggy face was genuine.

At the door, he turned for one last look. Stanhope had turned in her bed, and she was gazing at Potter with the pragmatic earnestness of a scientist observing a disappointing and wholly befuddling specimen. Her hand reached out to cover his, and though it was likely intended as a gesture of comfort from one long-suffering soul to another, it struck him as predatory. There was neither warmth nor sympathy in her eyes, only a grim resignation.

_No stranger to death, that girl. They're on more than nodding acquaintance. Do they tip their hats to one another when they pass? _

The thought was nonsensical, yet it chilled him utterly, and he hurried out and closed the door behind him before she could see him shudder.


	49. Of My Old Friends, Who Once Were Dear

Chapter Forty-Nine

While his gnarled little sibyl waltzed with his old nemesis and reluctant ally, Alastor Moody, Severus Snape found himself in a position that was becoming all too familiar. He sat on his sofa, slender, tapered hands folded between his knees, and stared at…nothing. He had had neither time nor use for such aesthetic fripperies as art, and he had wasted not one Galleon on the haughty acquisition of paintings to decorate his walls. As such, they were devoid of any distraction for eye or mind save the faint outlines of mildew against the stone.

He shifted on the sofa and leaned forward to inspect a particularly intricate pattern near the top right corner, an undulating whorl that somehow reminded him of a tentacle. It seemed to reach toward the junction of wall and ceiling in mute supplication, striving for a summit it would never reach. The straining tip stopped three inches from its goal, and in his mind's eye, he imagined the subterranean behemoth to which it belonged, an Elder God trapped forever beneath a sea of stone and winter damp, shorn of its might by those who dared call themselves his better and damned to tread the same stagnant water until the very fabric of the cosmos moldered to nothing.

Well could he understand its frustration. The week of his confinement had frayed his usually indomitable nerves to the breaking point. His palms were raw from constant rubbing together, and his lips were chapped from constant licking. The taste of blood was ever on his tongue, hot and coppery and salty, and beneath the bitter tang was the agonizing sweetness of old and forbidden memories.

He had tried so very hard to suppress them, his old and secret sins and illicit pleasures, and with the demands of teaching, supervising first-years through their first cack-handed practicals, feigning interest in Quidditch, and the dangerous game of espionage, he had all but succeeded. Oh, there had been brief lapses in the middle of the night, when he had awakened to find himself hard beneath his tatty, spartan nightclothes, hips rocking to a primal rhythm against the narrow mattress of his bachelor's bed. He could not deny that. Any more than he could deny that he embraced them when they came, lost himself to the opiate haze of his memories as he rutted against the bedclothes and savored the heady recollection of delicious friction stolen from between struggling thighs.

He was always ashamed afterward, when the endorphin rush of release had passed and the triumphant heat of his seed had cooled to unpleasant stickiness on his belly. That his vile deeds should creep up on him while he was at his most vulnerable enraged him; that he drew pleasure from them sickened him. His only consolation was that he had never acted upon the base urges these nocturnal reveries provoked. Those were slaked by a visit to Knockturn Alley and the procurement of a desperate whore who did not mind a Death Eater's hands upon her sagging breasts, and who would studiously ignore the Mark seared into his left forearm for a few Galleons more. He had learned to cope.

But if idle hands were the Devil's workshop, then so, too, was an idle mind, because with nothing to distract him, he found himself returning to the days of his darkness, resurrecting ghosts he had counted buried long ago. Faces he had forgotten suddenly regained painful acuity, and his ears rang with sounds he had banished-the sibilant purr of tearing fabric, the damp slap of conjoined flesh, muffled sobs, the somnolent, furtive drip of blood on a hearth rug. And in his mouth the taste of gall and vindication.

His mouth puckered in a moue of disgust, and his right hand strayed unconsciously to massage his left forearm. His fingers found the rough groove of eyeless sockets and began to trace in delicate circles. On the wall, the undulating tentacle of the deposed Elder God waved at him.

"This is ludicrous," he snarled to the empty room, but he continued to knead his hidden brand in slow, hypnotic circles, and when his pursed lips cracked and bled, his tongue darted out to catch the crimson droplets that beaded on his lower lip, and filled his mouth with that sultry tang.

Blood had been the catalyst for both his fall and his bid for redemption. The very foundations of the world were built upon it. It was the substance of life, more precious than gold, more vital than water. A man could survive three days without water, but he could not draw one breath more without the blood in his veins. One beast drew sustenance from the lifeblood of another, and men killed each other by the thousands in the name of purification.

_In that, at least, wizards and Muggles have something in common, _he thought wryly, and his ragged lips twisted into a bitter smile.

So much so that it was rumored Grindewald had allied himself with Muggle despot, Adolf Hitler, in an attempt to consolidate power on the Muggle and wizarding fronts. Whether there was any truth to it was debatable, but it had been the hot topic of discussion for the young Purebloods of his day. Indeed, on Hogsmeade weekends, they had gathered around the pocked and wobbling tables of the Three Broomsticks and ruminated upon the matter with the earnestness of young men burdened with too much money and too little sense. Armchair generals fought wars and achieved world domination while sipping butterbeers or hot apple cider and trying to cop a surreptitious feel on any female in the vicinity.

_But you never sat at the table, did you? Your blood was pure, but your purse strings were tattered. The father's opulence wasn't passed to the son, and with your worn robes and greasy hair, you were hardly the image of Pureblood savoir faire they were trying to cultivate. You were the unfortunate Pureblood, and so you were never invited to draw up a chair and rub elbows with your peers. You sat in the shadows, gangly and awkward as you perched in your uncomfortable chair, a hanger-on tolerated only to preserve the face of House solidarity. You slouched and listened to their grandiose plans and speculations, and you laughed at them from behind clenched teeth, because you knew they were fools. If they had only asked you, you could have told them, could have exposed their logical fallacies and proposed surer ways to victory, but they never asked, and you never volunteered. They underestimated you, and every one of them paid for it in the end._

A flicker of amusement. They had, at that. The merry band of coddled princelings had been no better than James Potter and his coterie as far as he was concerned, and he had taken immense satisfaction in watching them fall. One by one, the pride that had closed their eyes to his cunning and patient intelligence had brought them to a messy end, and when all was said and done, it had been knobbly-kneed Severus Snape that stood in the Dark Lord's favor.

There was Hephaestus Millwood, heir apparent to Lucius Malfoy's role as leader of the House. Brash and loud and wholly devoid of common sense, he espoused his views with reckless glee and made no secret of his plans to join the Movement. Just after his seventeenth birthday, Hephaestus had returned to the Slytherin Common Room, bragging of his initiation and still reeking of burnt flesh and stale sweat, and all the others had gathered around as he pulled back the sleeve of his robes to reveal the livid, red brand. How proud he had been, and Severus could vividly remember being twelve years old and so anxious to get a glimpse of the fabled Mark that he had knocked aside first-year Evan Rosier and relieved him of a front tooth. He had paid for his uncharacteristic chutzpah the following morning, when Evan's older brother, a Slytherin sixth-year, had thoughtfully and thoroughly returned the favor.

Millwood had not been so proud six years later, when a disdainfully bored Lucius Malfoy had slit his throat with a turn of his wrist. In fact, he had been groveling for his life before an impassive Dark Lord who did not forgive failure, and when his blood had spattered on the white silk of Severus' mask in a fine red mist, Severus had only smiled and dipped the toes of his boots into the warm, red puddle as he filed from the room with the rest of the Death Eater elite. To the victor went the spoils.

He had been the first, but he had not been the last. There was Ptolemy Cromwell, Millwood's crony, killed by Aurors during a botched raid the year after Severus joined the ranks. His body had been left for the crows and the sniggering Aurors. Only the truly favored were carried home by their comrades.

There was Domitius Figliari, throttled by his own tongue for speaking too freely of the Movement's plans, and Tobias Johanssen, captured by Aurors and tortured to insanity three months before he, Severus, came to himself with the sour gall of blood in his mouth and coating his teeth and fingers in a brilliant splash of crimson. Evan Rosier's brother, he of the complimentary rearrangement of Severus' teeth, committed suicide in Azkaban three years after the Dark Lord's first defeat at the hands of St. Potter the Second, and four years into his indentured servitude to Albus Dumbledore, he had done a lively, viciously triumphant jig behind the locked door off his office. Ashes, ashes, they all fell down.

They were all gone, moldering in their tombs, and here he sat, entombed within the walls of his chambers and pinning his fate on a mangled Gryffindor chit's ability to lie. It was galling, infuriating, and yet, he could not help but be amused. The dirty, greasy boy who had once privately derided the idea of a Dark Wizard stooping so low as to enlist the aid of a mad Muggle demagogue had been reduced to silent cheerleader to a child he would have throttled without a backward glance. Fortuna's wheel was capricious, indeed.

To be fair, she was hardly the beginning of his disillusionment. That had begun the moment the snake and skull had been branded into his flesh. The purposeful, disciplined group he had expected had turned out to be little more than a ragtag band of spoiled Pureblood elites and raving madmen seeking outlets for their gross deviance. There had been exceptions, of course, like-minded, intelligent individuals who truly believed in a wizarding society devoid of Mudblood rabble-Lucius, Narcissa and her fanatical and beautiful sister, Bellatrix, and her silent, heavy-browed paramour, Rudolphus Lestrange-but they were few and far between and the purest-blooded of them all. The others had been parasitic hangers-on, more interested in stout than revolution.

_Like your father._

He stiffened. He hadn't thought consciously of his father since the day the bastard had done the world a favor and suffered a brain hemorrhage over his morning porridge. Like the days of bloodletting, those memories had been relegated to the deepest, most isolated recesses of his mind, and they were given rein only in his uneasiest dreams. Now, those doors, too, had been thrown open, and with neither wand nor whiskey to drive them back, he had no choice but to endure them. He had Fudge and the Ministry to thank for that.

"Bloody bastards," he hissed, and rubbed his raw hands together, sand on parchment. He winced.

_That was where the real disillusionment began. Not in that barren, windswept clearing, with the wind clutching your robes with icy, bloodless fingers and the bright, feverish, orange eye of the branding iron leering out of the darkness, but in a sprawling, Tudor plunging inexorably into genteel decay. Your education as to the harsh reality of the world was found in the yellowing, peeling wallpaper in the drawing room and in your mother's face._

_When you were little, her face frightened you because it reminded you of that wallpaper, lined and ravaged and gradually sinking in upon itself beneath the weight of despair. It was so old; it wasn't a Mummy face at all. It was the face of disappointment and barely concealed terror. You used to pat it, try and smooth the grooves and lines away with your little-boy fingers, but no matter how hard you tried, they just grew deeper. By the time you were of age and ready to kick the dust of that house from your heels for the last time, she was a haggard and drawn husk with sagging cheeks and drooping breasts. Life beneath your father's iron heel had drained her of all vitality. Even the black eyes she passed to you were dead as cold cinders, and though you felt a traitor's guilt when you left here there with him, you were glad, too, because you couldn't bear to look at her anymore._

His scoured hands clutched his knees so tightly that the delicate flesh broke, and blood beaded on his palms and stippled the fabric of his robes. His knuckles were white, and he wondered for a moment if the bones had broken through the tender skin.

_You wonder how many of those lines on her face came from your hand. You were a child of twilight, born to her when most women have long since put dreams of motherhood aside. _My little miracle_, she called you, and she would put her cool hand on your forehead and brush your fringe from your face. But she never did it in your father's hearing, and you suspect your very existence earned her a stripe or two. You were not supposed to be, and your mother's miracle was your father's curse._

_He never raised a hand to you. That was reserved for your mother. He might not have wanted you, might have cursed your name and begrudged every Knut put to your care, but half of your flesh belonged to him, and vanity would not let him bruise it. He found other ways to visit his vengeance upon you. His lessons never marked your skin, but they cut more deeply than any physical blow._

_He taught you early that love was weakness. He knew you loved her, and he used it against you. If he was successful in nothing else in his wretched, misbegotten life, he was a master manipulator. If you disobeyed, he threatened her, and if boyish truculence stiffened your neck, he broke hers. Not literally, of course, but her anguished cries and the crack of flesh on flesh carried through the house, and with each cry, the years were stripped away, until you were four years old again and crouching in the wardrobe with snot and scalding tears streaming down your face._

_That was your first taste of the fundamental paradox. Your father spoke at length, when he spoke at all, about the superiority of blood. That was your lullaby, your bedtime story. You crouched at his feet like a feral cub, bare feet dancing on the cold stone floor, and listened to him sermonize. You never got any closer. He might have been your father, but touch was forbidden, and even if it weren't, he always smelled faintly of sweat and blood, as if he had splashed it on as part of his morning toilet. So you crouched, knees bent and toes flexed, and listened. Ambition and intelligence were hardly mutually exclusive, after all._

_He told you about your heritage and your responsibilities. A thousand years of history fell from his lips in a hypnotic singsong, a tale of Norman Snapes, Celtic Snapes, proper Saxon Snapes, and Briton Snapes. The Snape name was old as antiquity, and proud. Snapes were men of power and eminence, bred to be leaders of men and not to be ruled by heart's passion. Snapes ruled wheresoever they trod, and they commanded respect. Solemn and wide-eyed, you took it all in, this impossible legacy, and you were proud._

_Yet, even as he bestowed the mantle upon you, it was already crumbling. The family fortune was dwindling, thanks to your father's arrogance and predilection for the cards and his insatiable appetite for women. The familial land holdings were sold to pay gambling debts and feed the innumerable bastards he sired with bar wenches and Mudblood prostitutes, and your inheritance was gone long before your father died. _

_By the time you were thirteen, your father could no longer afford to maintain the pretense of respectable gentility and care for you, and so you were left to your own devices, sequestered in your damp, moldering room and slaughtering unwary flies while your unwashed skin itched and chafed beneath threadbare cotton underwear. The boys at Hogwarts laughed at you behind their cupped hands and freshly scrubbed faces and wrinkled their noses when you drew near. You were skinny and concave-chested, and when you stood before the looking glass, you searched desperately for the Pureblood avatar that lived beneath your skin, but try as you might, you could never draw him out._

_By fifteen and the year of your drubbing at the hands of Potter and his friends by the lake, the notion of Pureblood fraternity had been thoroughly disabused, as had your father's lingering hope of prominence. Your Pureblood fellows stood idly by and watched while the truth was revealed in an unbecoming flash of drab, tatty grey wool, and some of them even laughed while that was stripped away to reveal the whole sorry truth stamped into your bony hips and your black-thatched sex. And while you dangled upside down with your flaccid, mortified cock pointed south, your father swallowed gin, touted his fading superiority and exorcised his demons with each fist that struck your mother's pathetic, battered face._

_You were well-versed in hypocrisy and disappointment by the time Lucius Malfoy and Lord Voldemort drew you into their fold. That's why you accepted their outstretched hands so readily; you were looking for something better, for that fabled place where you could walk as the lord you were meant to be, where everyone saw your worth and trembled. There would be no tatty underwear, no fraying hems and clothes that smelled of sour sweat, just perfumed silk and adulation. You only wanted what your name had promised. _

_But when fire and burnt flesh had burned away all impurities and fanciful notions, all you found was more of the same. Empty arrogance and false entitlement. James Potters in Slytherin skins and brocade robes, more interested in debauchery than advancement of the Pureblood cause. More than once, a Death Eater raid was bollixed because the cream of Pureblood masculinity couldn't resist defiling himself with a Mudblood whore or "re-educating" a wayward Pureblood witch. They took what they could and left behind nothing but scorched earth and anguish, and even after all was said and done, you never got an equal share of the spoils. There was always a little less for you. It was always a little smaller or a bit shabbier, and the few times you protested, they chastised you for your greed while stuffing their own pockets with plunder. Even in the Promised Land, you were not good enough._

_Lord Voldemort was the biggest disappointment of all. Oh, there was no denying his power. He was the Serpent of serpents, dripping malevolence like musk and possessed of a charisma that mesmerized you even as it hardened you beneath your robes. That he was the heir of Slytherin was beyond doubt, but for all that, you found him lacking. Beneath his seductive rhetoric and bombast was the same selfishness and avarice displayed by your contemporaries. His loyalty was not to the Pureblood cause, but to himself. Yes, he would exterminate the Mudbloods and eventually the bothersome Muggles, but when the battle was over and the fields were awash in blood, there would be no redistribution of the hard-earned riches. Just Lord Voldemort standing astride the world and ruling it with an iron fist._

_And still you stayed, because you could not bear to admit your mistake, to concede that you didn't know everything, and it was better than being alone. Even if the promises were hollow, you could still count yourself among their number, find fraternity where none existed. For the first time in your life, you had purpose, a place to call your own, and you would not surrender that which you had bought with the flesh of your forearm._

_Besides, there were some who did believe. Lucius Malfoy was as arrogant as the rest, but he was a devout supporter of Pureblood dominance. He paid more than lip service to the cause. He gave Galleons and blood for it, and as much as you despise him, you respect him for that. He was smart enough, _Slytherin_ enough to escape Azkaban, which was more than you could say for the others. Rookwood, Dolohov, the Lestranges-for all their ardor, they were stupid and reckless enough to be caught, even if they were carted off to their cells with oaths of undying loyalty to Voldemort on their lips. They believed, and so did you, and for a while, that was enough._

_Until the night you found yourself on all fours in some ravaged home, your mouth filled with blood and your hands slick and warm with a Pureblood witch's life. There you sat, trousers bunched around your thighs, straddling a woman as Pure and noble as you, listening to the sounds of Rookwood pilfering their flat and Lucius patiently breaking the bones of her four-year-old son. The spell broke with the snapping of his neck, and as you stared into the ragged hole where her throat had been and counted your teeth marks, you had an epiphany. _

_You were not a deposed princeling reclaiming the fortune wrested from you by unkind circumstance and your father's penchant for whoring, nor were you a righteous crusader protecting your kind from the worthless and dangerously uneducated. You were a minion, a nineteen-year-old dray horse sent to dirty your hands so that he wouldn't have to. You were killing the very people you had sworn to exalt. You were a pawn, and when he was through with you, you would be just as dead as the woman beneath you. So you did what Slytherins do best. You found a way out. You left one devil to embrace another, because you'd be damned if you would serve on bended knee._

He snorted at the irony of that last. His wounded pride had balked at the prospect of eternal servitude, and yet he had sought sanctuary beneath the auspices of the hardest taskmaster of them all. Albus neither tortured nor threatened his supplicants, but his control was just as absolute as that of the Dark Lord he had fled. He achieved his ends with kindness and implacable serenity, and the knife he wielded cut more deeply than any curse Lord Voldemort had ever cast, because it was acquiescence born of obligation and terrible guilt. He could no more refuse Albus than he could ignore the call of the Dark Mark when it came. Too much had been bartered away on his behalf. He resented the burden the Headmaster's salvation had foisted upon him, but he could not bear to see disappointment in those wise blue eyes. He was caught in a catch-22 of his own making.

He wondered what they would think of him now, his old friends who were rotting away in Azkaban, sloughing years like old skin and watching sanity slip through their fingers like dust. His rational mind doubted they thought of him at all. They were too consumed by the darkness and the damp and the sussurating flutter of a Dementor's robes. Bellatrix, whose sanity was already deteriorating when the Aurors led her away, had likely progressed to devouring the rats and spiders unwise enough to venture into her cell, Renfield's daughter with the long black hair. He knew all of this, but the shred of imagination he allowed himself fancied that they might ponder him from time to time when all the old grudges had been put aside and there was nothing else to fill the hours. Did they envy him his freedom, or did they admire his cunning?

Not that there was much to inspire jealousy anymore. The liberty for which he had paid so dearly was gone, and he was just as caged. There were no rats and no slinking Dementors, but Fudge and the Aurors would suffice until justice washed over him in a black caul of ice and despair. His shifting allegiance had gained him nothing.

_It gave you a second chance,_ whispered the niggling voice of hope that would not be quashed, and he cursed Albus Dumbledore's nauseating optimism with every fiber of his being.

What good had it done? He had added to nothing but his years, and his legacy remained the same. Once, he had wanted to rule the world; now he only wished to be remembered by it. He didn't care how. The respect for which he had so hungered had never come, and when he failed to inspire it in even the most puling of his pupils, he had settled for fear. Fear the little bastards understood. Now even that was gone, stripped away the moment the Headmaster had removed his Head of House pin.

His fingers drifted to the collar of his robes. Nothing but two pinprick holes where it should be. His hand fell to his lap.

_Here you sit, a heartbeat away from a Dementor's Kiss and an unmarked grave, and all you can think about are your past sins and the friends you never had. Shouldn't you be thinking of Potter the Younger and how to escape inevitable consequence one last time? Because your quixotic chit is not going to save you, no matter what Dumbledore thinks._

He was thinking of Potter, oddly enough. Just not that one. He could no more avoid contemplating the apple of House Gryffindor and all its generations than he could stay his acerbic tongue from lashing out at insufferable idiocy. The Potters were the bookends to his life. The father had driven him to the darkness, and now the son would carry him to the gallows. He would not be at all surprised to find Potterian threads in his burial shroud.

His thoughts turned to Harry Potter and that fateful day in Potions. He could see it all so clearly, feel it with total sensory recall. The milky, badly botched Advanced Sleeping Draught crawling from one side of the phial to the other as he tilted it to and fro in the wan torchlight. The flickering smirk that had darted across his thin lips like the twitching of a cat's tail. The hushed silence that only uneasy expectation brings. Potter's truculent, defiant face as he trudged to the front of the room. And then that terrible, lolling weight as comeuppance had gone awry.

_Sweat. He smelled like sweat and laundry soap,_ he thought suddenly and for no reason at all. _Like healthy boy. Or a small child._

He rose from the couch in a single swift motion, knees popping like dried bones tossed upon a fire, and began to pace. His muscles were stiff from long hours of confinement and the needling cold that seeped through the castle walls and settled into his bones. The numbing chill was usually kept at bay by the torches and the fire, but most of the former had gone out for want of a daily _Incendio_, and the fireplace had last been used on the night of the Headmaster's ridiculous jig. He could light neither without his wand, and Fudge had confiscated that.

He stamped his feet to force blood flow and the return of sensation and clasped his hands behind his back. He had been over Potter's collapse from every fathomable perspective, and the answer to the mystery eluded him. The cyanide should not have been there, and it should certainly not have come from his own damn stores, but the missing grams and the presence of the poison in the phial stood in stark contradiction to his truth.

He had pondered a thousand scenarios, each more improbable than the next, and dismissed them, only to return to them and turn them over in his mind, the tendrils of his consciousness curling over them in a desperate lover's caress. He searched for any flaws in his logic, any small clue he had overlooked. He had even wondered if he hadn't transferred the cyanide without realizing it. But no. He had washed his hands thoroughly before handling the phial, a compulsive habit that had served him well, and even if he hadn't, the blasted draught had been stoppered and sealed until Potter drank it.

"It was sealed," he snarled, and fought the impulse to knead his temples. A headache was forming behind his eyes, and there was no Anti-Ache to quell it.

How, then? For all its wonders, the magical world was still subject to certain incontrovertible laws. There was no miraculous osmosis to explain the contamination. The glass of his storage phials was non-porous to prevent dangerous commingling, and they were subjected to a rigorous inspection, not only at their place of manufacture, but upon receipt at the school. Any defective phials were immediately discarded. He took no chances.

Which meant that either the potion had been poisoned before it was stoppered and given to him, or it was exposed to the contaminant when it was opened. Neither option was plausible. Potter was a sullen, mollycoddled brat, but as a student, he was indifferent and sloppy, not stupid. His friends were unlikely candidates for sabotage. Weasley _was_ an unsalvageable twit, but he lacked the subtlety and finesse for such a feat, and Hermione Granger, swot and future spinster, would never have attempted it. Poisoning was no doubt an affront to her Gryffindor sensibilities, and what was more, had she been the perpetrator, she would not have failed. She was nothing if not thorough.

That left exposure to airborne contaminant as the other possible reason, but that, too, collapsed under close scrutiny. Airborne cyanide was deadly, and when last he checked, it was hardly selective in whom it struck. If it were loose in the air, it would have adversely affected all occupants of the room, not just Potter, and aside from Stanhope's erratic twitching, no one had demonstrated any ill effects. They had left his classroom as they had entered it, shaken but upright.

_Maybe he did it on purpose._

It always came back to that in the end, that tantalizing lure of the endgame. Gryffindors were hardly known for their subtlety, and Potters least of all. He had no doubt that in the deepest, most closely guarded pit of his vacuous little mind, Potter had imagined this, his vengeance and his escape from an obligation he did not want. Death and liberation, and while dewy-eyed mourners sifted damp, graveyard earth between their fingers in silent farewell, the greasy bastard he had so despised would rock and croon in some forgotten cell, bereft of consciousness and memory, and from his lofty perch in the heavens, the boy would look down and laugh at his fallen foe.

It was delicious, and he wanted to believe it. He had so long played the role of the downtrodden victim and the sputtering fool in the courts of Kings Voldemort and Dumbledore that he had acquired a taste for it, mud and ridicule and degradation, and if he was to endure this, it would give him no greater pleasure than to shout in the old man's face, point a long, accusatory finger and cry, "See! See what your cosseted little champion has done?" as they dragged him away. The very thought sent a shiver of gleeful anticipation down his spine and the taste of honey into his mouth. Ha Satan at the last.

A delicious, longing fantasy was all it would ever be, however, and he knew it. Potter was bitter and brash and brimming with resentment for his lot and hatred for all things Slytherin, but his ego demanded of him a better death than wasting to skin and bones beneath an infirmary bedsheet, demanded a swan song to match his illustrious and revered father's demise. No Potter ever died on his knees, and he was prepared to wager every last Galleon is his meager Gringotts account that Harry had no intention of being the first. Like as not, if the wretch survived this, he would die with his teeth buried in the Dark Lord's throat, his wand clutched in lifeless, stiffening fingers. He would die a hero's death.

He snorted and watched the breath fog the air in front of him. Wasn't that what he had dreamt of as a boy, to live as a lord or to die the death of the valorous, wand aloft and teeth bared in eternal defiance? All rot. There was no good death, no nobility in the final breath. Death was cruel and ugly, and it had no care with either saint or sinner, the aged or the child. Villain or hero, they all died in their own filth.

All his theories spent, he returned to the beginning, fingers moving deftly through the tangled threads of the problem with the deft familiarity of long acquaintance. He found the tattered edges of discarded possibility and the nub of a memory he could not quite recall. Merlin knew he had tried. He had spent hours coaxing his stubborn mind to surrender it, but he had trained it well, and it would not relent. The memory remained just beyond his grasp, blurry and indistinct.

It had come to him once, in the throes of a nightmare from which he had awakened sweating and chilled, a scream trapped behind his lips. The warded cabinet had loomed before his bulging eyes, and a flare of pain, ravenous and hot, engulfed his legs. Everything had clicked into place then, but by the time he had scrambled from the bed in search of parchment and quill and shaken the slumber from his bones, the epiphanic surety had faded into sloe-eyed consternation, and he had stood in the frozen darkness of his bedroom, blinking and groping stupidly, until he had conceded defeat and crawled beneath the covers again to seek a sleep that would not come.

_All for want of a quill, _he thought savagely, and was seized with the urge to throw something. Anything, so long as he could have the satisfaction of watching it splinter against the wall.

There was nothing, of course. The Aurors had seized everything that could have been construed as a weapon or an implement of suicide. All that remained to him were time and boot polish and the dust raised by his footfalls as he paced to and fro, and of the three, the latter was dispatched thrice a week by the industrious little house elf who brought his meals and tidied what little clutter he had. He considered lobbing one of the worn throw pillows that slouched disconsolately on the sofa, but decided against it. There would be no twisted wreckage, no visible record of his rage. Just a sibilant huff as cloth struck stone. The gesture of a beaten, impotent man.

The anger came, a white-hot coal lodged in his chest, and he welcomed it. It was better than the helplessness and the stupefying despair, the crippling ennui that cemented him to his bed long after the sun had reached its watery winter zenith. It was bracing, this sick fury, and feverish warmth crept into his fingertips. He flexed them, fingers furling and unfurling like the petals of a poisonous lily. Open. Close. The raw flesh of his palms stung, but he was glad. Pain meant that hope was not yet dead, that vengeance could still be his. A bloodless smirk twitched in the corners of his mouth. Sooner or later, it would be.

There would be a reckoning to the last man. The meticulous accounting of grievances had been a gift from both his father and Lucius Malfoy, and as hestood with the blood surging through his hands, the list of debtors paraded through his mind in a ragtag menagerie-Fudge, with his punctilious, porcine face and ludicrous bowler hat, smug and foolishly unwary, and the Aurors, toadying and incompetent all; Lucius, for breaking for good and all his fragile belief in camaraderie, and Potter, for being weak enough to fall in the first place.

And Stanhope, of course. His changeling child was not exempt from the consequences of failure. Indeed, he held her to the most exacting standard of all. If she fell short and he was led from Hogwarts in manacles, the choicest curses and direst poxes would be reserved for her. Her protestations of good intention would not avail her. He would flay her with his serrated tongue, leave her battered and shivering in his wake. She had dared give him hope, and if she could not secure his deliverance, there would be no pardon.

_And what of Dumbledore? Where is he on your list of penitents?_

A thin, humorless smile. The puppet master had no place. His immunity from retribution had been guaranteed the instant he sacrificed a precious life debt to the futile cause that was Severus Snape. For him, there would be no vitriol, no black-biled condemnation, only an inclination of his head and a twisted, forlorn smile. _And so we come to the end, as we both knew we would someday. The fault is mine. Your only mistake was to have faith in the faithless._

_Merlin, _groaned the sardonic voice inside his head, _stop spouting such maudlin, positively Gryffindorian poetry. One can only tolerate so much sop._

That earned a guttural bark of amusement. His sense of humor had not deserted him entirely, then.

The door to his chambers opened, and he tensed. His hand groped for a wand that wasn't there, and his teeth ground in frustration. Damn Fudge for leaving him so naked. But that was the point, wasn't it? He growled deep in his throat and whirled to face the interloper. If it were Fudge and his slack-jawed cronies, come to jab and hoot at their caged Death Eater, he had no intention of submitting to further indignities. They could paw him after they had wiped the blood from his whitened knuckles. His hands curled into fists.

But the face that peered anxiously around the door belonged to the timorous house elf that brought his meals. Avid, solicitous eyes blinked at him from behind oak and dark varnish, and leathery fingers curled around the door, the stealthy creep of wisteria over an untended trellis.

"Is the Professor Snape well today?" came the shy query, and the elf's ears twitched, twin antennae testing the atmosphere of the room.

The simpering tone irritated him, and his lips drew away from his teeth in a disgusted sneer. "My well-being is of no concern to you. Now stop scraping and trembling and go about your work. And close the door. I'll not tolerate a draught."

He turned from the door and surrendered to the urge to knead his temples. The migraine was a hot, throbbing spike at the base of his skull and the hollows of his cheek. Soon, it would be a rhythmic hammerblow behind his eyes, and his vision would be obscured by starbursts of color that expanded with every heartbeat. By tea, he would be all but blind, and the slightest sound would send jagged glass into his brain. By supper, he would be coiled between the bathtub and the loo, paying obeisance to the chamberpot god and pressing his feverish brow to the sympathetic porcelain while the roiling nausea turned him inside out.

"Damn Fudge," he muttered, and winced at the sizzling flare of pain in his head.

The elf quailed and scuttled into the room, a tray balanced on one palm. "Bitty is sorry, Professor, sir," it squeaked. "I is not meaning to disturb you. I is bringing your food." The elf-he was reasonably certain it was a she-curtseyed, and the pitcher atop the tray yawed precariously.

"Have a care, you impertinent little dolt," he snapped.

Bitty flinched and righted herself with a whimper, and the pitcher listed decidedly aft and narrowly missed overturning into his plate of roast chicken and corn. "Forgive Bitty, Master Snape. She is only trying to help."

He snorted. The china plate was preternaturally bright, and he squinted against the darning needle shafts of light that pierced his eyes. The food was diseased, brown and greasy and reeking of spices. The chicken skin looked like tarnished copper, and his stomach lurched. The cold, metallic tang of the silverware struck his nose, and he belched, sour bile and gastric juices, and he closed his eyes against a wave of nausea.

"Take it away," he ordered. "It's inedible slop."

Bitty gazed at him in bug-eyed incredulity. "Bitty is begging your pardon, sir, but this is not slop." Tiny shoulders stiffened in wounded indignation. "Bitty is cooking this herself. All the students is eating her food, and they is enjoying it."

"As it is a choice between starvation and sustenance of dubious origin, I would hardly construe the students' consumption of your 'food' an endorsement." Sharp, peevish. Merlin, but the smell of the grease and the brightness of the plate were overwhelming. The nausea was a dull cramp in his gut.

"Bitty is leaving it here, sir," she said resolutely. "You is needing to eat." She placed the tray on a nearby chair.

The fraying cord of his temper snapped with an almost audible twang, and a diffuse, red haze clouded his vision. The migraine blossomed inside his skull, the hot throb of an exploded tumor, and the taste of metal shavings filled his mouth. He had endured many humiliations in his quest for redemption-groveling for the charity of a Gryffindor teetering on the precipice of dotage, the sneers and whispers of ungrateful children unworthy of the sweat from his soles, this farcical imprisonment, the loss of his hard-won station-but his pride was not yet so dead that he would be dictated to by a grubby, audacious house elf.

He seized the tray and hurled it at the wall, and the bones of his elbow creaked in mild protest. The tray clattered to the floor, unharmed, but its contents were not as fortunate. The pitcher disintegrated in a shower of milk and ceramic powder, and he instinctively shielded his eyes from the debris with an outstretched palm. The plate, too, shattered with an anguish screech, and the chicken breast slid down the wall, leaving grease in its wake like viscera. The corn peppered the room, fibrous shrapnel, and he slapped disdainfully at a kernel lodged in his sleeve. More kernels clung to the ceiling and the toes of his boots.

"Now," he seethed, queasy, but filled with a satisfaction that bordered on erotic, "have I made myself clear?"

Bitty made no answer. Her eyes were fixed on the bits of crockery puddled at the end of the grease smear, and her trembling hands tugged on the ends of her ears. She swayed on her feet, and for a moment, he was sure she was going to crumple to the floor in a dead faint, but she kept her feet in defiance of gravity.

"Well, have I?" he purred.

Bitty moaned, a low, tremulous sob, and her eyes rolled in their sockets until they fixed on him, wide and bright with swooning terror, a sparrow caught in the strangling coils of a serpent. He had seen that look times uncounted on the faces of his hapless victims, paralytic fear and boneless capitulation. Recognition of his power. Victory. Beneath the blinding pulse of the migraine, shame warred with fleeting, perverse glee.

He crouched, ignoring the creak of his knees, and tilted the cowering elf's chin. "Well?" His breath misted on the tip of her mottled, brown nose. He was close to the remnants of his lunch, and the rich, meaty smell tickled his gorge again. He swallowed the rising bile with a Herculean effort.

Bitty recoiled from the caress of his fingertips. "I is understanding," she shrieked, and staggered away. She tripped over the hem of her Hogwarts toga and sprawled on the floor.

He stared at her, face impassive.

_You understand now, don't you? I still have power, a means of exerting my will. They may have stripped me of my rank and trodden upon my dignity until it was indiscernible from the dust that covered it, but they have not broken me. Not yet. These fangs are still sharp, their poison still potent. I am not to be pitied. If you do not respect me, you will fear me ere the end._

"Then stop sniveling and clean up this mess." Cold and pitiless. When the elf made no move to obey, he seized her by the arm and yanked her to her feet. "If you fail to do so, you will joined the dregs of dinner in their untidy heap."

The elf uttered a breathless scream and scrambled away, fingers curled around the place where he had touched her. She rubbed the flesh of her arm as if it pained her, and perhaps it did. Anger often made him indiscriminate.

_Like Stanhope? _prodded the uneasy voice of his conscience, and the image of a five-fingered bruise formed in his mind.

An unexpected prickle of guilt. _That was different. She is a pupil; this is a beast bred for the express purpose of cleaning my lavatory._

Bitty spared him a watery, contemptuous glare and set about tidying the mess. There was utter silence save for the clink and grind of gathered shards and her wavering voice as she muttered the words to an elvish ditty under her breath. He watched her for a moment as she bent and rose, bent and rose, the fragments cradled in the crook and wattles of her arm like an injured child, and then he spun on his heels and stalked into his bedroom and the soothing promise of his boots. He felt like humming himself.

He listened for a while to the muted sounds of Bitty cleaning, and that, coupled with the hushed murmur of bootblack smoothed over old leather, afforded him a serenity that had long eluded him. Not even the nausea and simmering throb of blood in his temples could dislodge it. Even when the migraine claimed him completely and he was huddled over the toilet, vomiting bile with a queer, gargling ratchet that sounded like _Potter_ to his muffled ears and pressing his forehead to the forgiving porcelain, he fought the urge to smile.


	50. Toad and Serpent King in the Land of Use...

Chapter Fifty

Dolores Umbridge stumped down the corridor toward the doors of Hogwarts and the broad, brown expanse of the castle green, clipboard clamped beneath one jiggling bicep. Her jowls quivered with rage and indignation, and her stubby, bejeweled fingers rose to pat compulsively at imaginary wisps of stray hair. Several students craned their necks in idle curiosity as she passed, and for once, she could not muster a smile.

Thanks to Albus Dumbledore, the meddlesome old fool. And McGonagall, of course. Gipetto and his puppet. Not a syllable emerged from the idealistic codger's mouth that wasn't fawned over and parroted by the priggish, frigid spinster in tartan robes, and Dolores wondered if there weren't more to their relationship than that of Headmaster and Deputy Headmistress. Word was that they had known each other for more than fifty years, and it wouldn't surprise her in the least to discover that their "staff meetings" went well beyond a bit of brandy in the Headmaster's office and a chat about a toiletry shortage. The Ministry was rife with those sort of tawdry goings-on despite her best efforts to stamp them out.

_Like that woman-what was her name? The one who was spending valuable Ministry time in the supply cabinet with her knickers around her knees and her quim full of pimply-faced post boy. Eunice? No. Agnes. Yes, that was it. Agnes Mulgrew. Little hussy. Broke more blasted quills with her obscene gyrations. Sent the budget through the roof. And was she sacked when I alerted the Minister? Of course not. The little tart wasn't even demoted. In fact, she got moved up to the Minister's office. Fancy that._

She shouldn't have been surprised. Minister Fudge was a well-intended man, but he had more bluster than backbone and was too busy fretting over the fickle whims of his constituents to effect actual reform. Time and time again, she and others of like and sensible mind had pressed him for endorsement of proposals and legislation, only to be told that the public mood would not stand for it. He was too entrenched, too fond of his role as arbiter of the status quo, and his affinity for the prestigious title of Minister had made him a coward.

Not that circumspection wasn't needed. Indeed, it could be one's finest weapon. Guile was a sweeter poison than brute force, and a smile and nod had gained her more than saber rattling ever had. Her face was her mask, and from behind her rampart of matronly jollity, she had brought many foes low, a long-toothed wolf in the guise of a lamb. She had turned the condescension and chauvinism of her male peers to her advantage, and while they were busy pounding the pulpits and causing ears to ring with their pomposity and bombast, she sat quietly in the shadows and smiled, her ear to the ground and her lips pressed to the ears of her superiors.

_Some would say you have them pressed to other, more ignominious places._

She sniffed. The business of politics was rarely pleasant. Some sacrifice was inevitable, and pride was easily expended in the pursuit of power; if her lips tasted of sanctimony and derriere, at least she could say without question that she had never compromised her convictions in the name of appeasement. Each handshake wasted on a fool, each demure acquiescence to the better-positioned foe carried the weight of purpose. The crippling blow need not be delivered with a howl.

Something Fudge would do well to learn. The idiot was currently ensconced in Dumbledore's office, having his ear bent by Shacklebolt regarding the incident with the loathsome little Stanhope child and tilting ineffectually at this latest windmill so artfully presented by the Headmaster and his cronies. No doubt they were wailing and rending their oft-patched sackcloths over this egregious breach of investigatory protocol, and the Minister, bumbling tit that he was, would entertain their ravings. Never mind that all sense of propriety had fallen by the wayside the moment Snape had been remanded to his rooms rather than a cell in Azkaban or the Ministry interrogation office.

She thought she could lay that at Albus Dumbledore's feet, too. The crafty iconoclast had a well of debt as fathomless as the ages, so it was said, and she did not doubt it. Even in her school days, when he had still been a Transfigurations teacher and Head of House Gryffindor, he had been setting the shackles, binding others to him with his largesse. To the students under his thrall, he had been Father Christmas and Peter Pan, wise as their stodgy fathers, but possessed of a young boy's sly hubris. He had asked for their confidence in the name of counsel, and he had turned it into currency for his ends, the finest bit of Transfiguration he had ever managed. Trust into cold, inescapable obligation.

One by one, the traps had snapped closed around the unsuspecting consciences and hearts of the innocent. They had entered his lair with the unfettered buoyancy of the young, and when they had emerged, their steps were lumbering and graceless, encumbered by the weight of promissory servitude. Sometimes the knowledge of what they had done was in their eyes, too, a glazed, disbelieving torpor, as though he had struck them a blow to the head. And now that she thought on it a bit, perhaps he had.

An image arose in her mind of Dumbledore, seated in the office he would one day bestow upon his lackey, fingers tented beneath his nose as he stared at the pupil standing before him over the rims of his spectacles. The beard was not so full yet, nor was it painted with the veneration of advancing years. Just auburn and grey back then. Fire and smoke. The face behind the hands was grave, but the eyes were twinkling.

Mr. Hubert._ Genial, yet full of authoritarian gravitas. The gaze leveled at the boy neither softened nor wavered._

_The boy shuffled his feet and peered at Dumbledore from behind an untidy blond fringe. _Yes, Professor_. Muffled, indistinct, and-dare she say it-fearful._

_He knows, _she thought giddily, and pressed her face against the cool, slick face of the looking glass of cherished fancy. _He knows the truth. He sees it. Good boy. Don't be caught by his enticements. Stay away!_

But there was only one way this could ever end, the only way it ever had. Dumbledore was too wise, as Slytherin as he was Gryffindor, and the boy wrought of gossamer and imagination was too callow to resist the lure of easy succor. Even the power of her indomitable will could not change that.

What is it that you need, Mr. Hubert?

_The boy's eyes were wide and feverish in his pinched face. It was an effort to look at the man behind the desk. It was much easier to let his gaze drift to the hearth rug or the toes of his boots._

Help, sir,_ he said meekly. _I need help

_A thoughtful grunt from Dumbledore's throat. _Mm. Do you, indeed? You understandthe price, do you not?_ His long index finger tapped pursed lips. _

_The boy nodded. _

Ah, I'm afraid I can't hear you, Mr. Hubert.

_The boy swallowed with an audible click, and his Adam's apple bobbed. _Yes, sir.

_That serene gaze sharpened until it became hard as rivets, and when Dumbledore spoke again, it was almost an invocation. _Are you prepared to pay it?

_The boy hesitated. Not for long, but enough. Dumbledore's hand darted out and cuffed the boy on the temple, a stinging slap that sent him reeling. The boy gaped at him in wounded incredulity, and then realization came, slowly as the spread of pooling blood. The nature of his bargain revealed at the last. _

_You know now, boy. I see it in your face. Knowledge is a terrible thing, the defiler of innocence. It is not Father Christmas that stands before you, but Mephistopheles, and deals with the devil never end well. You cannot go back. If you refuse, he will steal your memory and extract his pound of flesh all the same._

_Dumbledore stared at the boy, who stood with his hand clapped to the side of his head. _Are you prepared?_ he repeated._

_The boy nodded and cowered beneath the pitiless scrutiny._

_Dumbledore considered him for a moment and then stretched forth his hand. _So let itbe.

Her own laughter startled her from her reverie. How long had it been since she had indulged in that rancid daydream? She couldn't remember. She had been a slip of a girl when she had conceived it, young and fresh and feral as a badger, not yet tortured by life's vagaries and bloated by too many consolatory sweets eaten to ease the bitter sting of dashed expectation. It had been her talisman against the lemon sherbet lure of the man who would be king, and it had pleased her to know that though she was a Ravenclaw, steeped in calculation and reason and the pursuit of knowledge, the breath of imagination breathed in her still. With the passage of years, she would learn the folly of such thinking, but then such a notion still had the power to make her glad. How she envied her long spent youth.

The vision, tantalizing as it was, was sheer pap. Dumbledore of the Lofty Notions would no more have struck a student than he would display proper humility to his superiors. It simply wasn't in him to rule by the right of might. No, he bound his prey to him beneath the yoke of kindness unbidden, ensnared them with their own compassion, and he sealed his life debts with the exchange of a hard lump of yellow confectioner's sugar, a sweet that cut more deeply than the cruelest slave driver's knout.

She had known this from the time she was a child, and yet her schoolmates had gone to him one after the other, a parade of tin toy soldiers marching to their own candyland perdition. Even those who should have known better, fellow Ravenclaws like Amelia Bones, had joined the starry-eyed retinue that thronged to his office, swept up in the tide of bumbling, oafish Hufflepuffs and tweedy, vainglorious Gryffindors.

Oh, there were a few who had resisted, and she was proud to count herself among them, but it had always troubled her that so many of her fellow holdouts had lived in the cool, dark den of House Slytherin. It had given her more than a few sleepless nights in the Ravenclaw Common Room, in fact, to know that the dregs and reprobates of the school shared her unreasoning antipathy, but in the end, she had decided that they shunned him because they saw him for what he truly was.

_An asp as poisonous and withering as the water of the river Styx. He was a far greater manipulator of men than even their great founder, Salazar Slytherin, could have ever hoped to be. For all his cunning, there was a glimmer of honesty in his words, a seed of nobility in his cause, but in Dumbledore…_

_Oh, he was the consummate chess master, the bishop and the king rolled into one, and he moved the pawns with the ruthless precision of long practice. The parents adored him, and so did the children, and through his tireless accrual of favors owed, he made his bid to become master of the castle keep. If anyone had asked you or the wary Slytherins coiled in their lair, you could have told them, but nobody had ever asked straitlaced, ugly Dolores anything, not even whether or not she would like the whipped potatoes, please, and the Slytherins were easily brushed aside. So you never told them about the asp in lion's clothing, and when Headmaster Dippet tottered off into the twilight fog of senility, Albus Dumbledore, beloved Transfigurations professor, ascended to the throne._

A shudder rippled up her spine, and the nape of her neck prickled and knotted into hard nubs of gooseflesh. If she had only been blessed with the gift of foresight, if only she had known the diseased notions he would propagate, the assault he would wage on their world in the name of progress and his own bid for power. She would have screamed the truth until her voice forsook her, sounded the clarion call of dire warning from the highest peak, but her belated realization had come too late, and she could only watch as his cancerous coils twined around every facet of wizarding society and remolded it in his image.

_You always saw. Even as a child, you could sense the disease in others, smell the rot beneath their skin. Your parents never understood why you recoiled from strangers on the street or refused the happily offered sweets from family friends. They rebuked you when you cried and shied into your mother's robes, and sometimes, your wariness earned you a spanking. It wasn't polite to embarrass them at their gay tea parties with your reticence. You were well-mannered above all else, and appearance was paramount. You tried to please them, tried to smile and stretch forth your hands to touch those blighted, noisome hands, but the smile felt like a rictus, and no soap could ever rid you of the taint, and soon, you endured the rebukes and the dour faces and the swats, because the thought of letting one of _them_ touch you turned sugar to gall and bile in your stomach._

_Well, what more could I have expected from the likes of them? _she thought furiously, and her heels clacked against the stone with the crisp, echoing report of snapping kindling. _Idealists, both. Mother, with her slender dancer's frame and grace born of ice and wonder. Mother, who always lamented her frumpy, bullish daughter and wondered why no suitors came to call._

_Put on some rouge, why don't you, Dolores? No lady ever leaves the house without looking her best. And put on some more flattering robes. You look so dour, _chirped the voice of her mother, and in her mind's eye, she could see her perched on a stool in front of her vanity, silver compact balanced in the palm of one hand as she deftly powdered her nose with a delicate sniff.

_You always wanted to ask her if she was still a lady at night when the lights were out and the sounds came from behind their closed bedroom door. Did a lady really give voice to such whispers as seeped from beneath their chamber door and nestled in the shell of your ear like a dirty secret? Did a lady scream and whimper and utter words Father only muttered beneath his breath? You very much doubted it, but you never asked, though the curiosity burned your tongue. Your feet might not have grasped the arabesques and pirouettes your mother tried to teach them, but you understood the language of consequence very well, indeed. A gift from your father._

_You resented him for a great many unwanted legacies-his jowls and drooping eyelids and the propensity of his muscles to run to fat-but for that bequest you were forever grateful. He taught you the value of forethought, of weighing the scales before committing yourself. He taught you the importance of prudence in your alliances and of solidifying your position before a strike._

_Only he didn't teach by example. Rather, he taught by being the antithesis of all that was wise and good. He had political ambitions-oh, they were grand-but he had neither focus nor discipline, and his dreams of being Minister of Magic proved as illusive and unattainable as smoke in a mirror. He never made it farther than post page at the Derbyshire council hall. He blundered from one scheme to another, grasping at straw and spidersilk, and all of them came to nothing in turn._

_You remember those dinner parties? How deadly dull they were. The shabby, if respectable lower middle-class dining room, the wedding china taken from the armoire by your mother. It was yeomen china, thick and ugly, and no matter how often your mother washed it in the hours before the party, there was always grit on the plate. Still, your mother predicted woe and misery unending should a piece be chipped._

Appearances, Dolores, _she would trill in her nauseating falsetto, and you would fight not to clap her hands over your ears. Your mother would wag one perfectly manicured fingernail at you_. Respectable families don't eat off chipped china. It's gauche.

_So there you would sit in your itchy, uncomfortable pinafore, and secretly, you thought it made you look like a chiffon and lace seal, or perhaps a piglet someone had rouged as a joke. Not that it mattered. The adults paid you never mind. They wittered on about Quidditch and current events and the incompetence of the Ministerial offices, and the wine flowed into cheap brass goblets in a sweet, stupefying stream. When your father had communed at length with the great lord, Bacchus, he would rise and rail against the bureaucracy for which he worked_, _listing his qualifications for the job, which seemed paltry even to your tender ears. His friends, blinded by spirits and drunken joie de vivre, raised their goblets and pounded the table in raucous approbation, and you stabbed your peas with the whipped potato-slick tines of your fork and prayed for the blessed hour when you would be excused and allowed to retreat to the comfort of your bed._

_Later, when you had been Sorted and you came to the table with the Ravenclaw scarf draped around your neck like a hero's medal, the adults patted you on the head and smiled their condescending smiles and brushed aside your achievement._

Ravenclaw, eh? Not bad. Gryffindor's where you really want to be. Still, at least it wasn't Hufflepuff. Lot of duffers, they are, they said. Pass the peas.

_And you hated them for it. You wanted to stand up on your chair and shout, rail at them the way your father ranted against those who so blithely trod upon his dreams. You wanted to wave your arms and stamp your feet and froth, wave the scarf beneath their arrogant, dismissive noses and rub their faces in the glorious mark of your potential. But you never did, because it wasn't respectable, and only Daddy was allowed to be mad_.

_Then, when you were thirteen, you met the werewolf, and you _knew_. You smelled the corruption on his breath and saw the depravity in his eyes, and you found your purpose in it. Your parents were passive gainsayers, content to prate about respectability and the expectations of one's station, but loath to exert more than the meager force of their gums in pursuit of the ideal. You would do what they would not. You would find all that was wrong and festering and evil in your world, and you would root it out. You would not cozen the reprobates and derelicts to curry fleeting favorite. You would heal the world. You would make it respectable_.

She smiled at the recollection, not the lupine, saccharine grimace of the facia politic, but a genuine, sunny smile that lit her doughy face and melted away the lines left by the passage of unkind years. What an epiphany that had been! For the first time in her life, she had been more than the lumpy sum of her parts, the ungainly progeny of a former dancer gone to seed and manic frippery and an aspiring politician with not the faintest hope of realizing his dream.

_You were on the divan in drawing room when they came in. Well, what your mother optimistically dubbed the drawing room, at any rate, that shabby room full of must and stale cigar smoke and moldering leather. You were curled there with a book, for once not required to smile and curtsey before the jester and his folly's court. The Frog Prince, it was, and the gilted gold of the pages' edges flaked onto the pads of your fingers like fairy dust. You were happy, lost in girlish dreams of your own Prince Charming and transforming your callused, broad feet into ones fragile and dainty enough to fit inside a glass slipper. Feet much like your mother's._

_And then she glided into the room, trailed by the smell of lavender and a man in a shabby coat with patches at the elbows. The princess and the pauper. She held the folds of her skirt in her tiny fingers as she came, and her small, rounded chin jutted forward in haughty defiance of her shabby surroundings. You stared at her feet as she advanced. They were soft and white as lilies, and you wondered that they could bear her up at all. You tucked your shoes beneath the hem of your robes so she would not see them._

Ah, Dolores, dear! I'd wondered where you'd got to. What are you doing in here? You should be out mingling with our guests. _Subtle, ominous emphasis on that last, as if the boors and drunkards stumbling through the parlor and slouching around your father's table were exotic fauna rather than wobbling ne'er-do-wells._

Yes, Mummy, _you said, and your eyes drifted to the sterile whiteness of the page. Anything was better than gazing into that imperious face and seeing the disappointment there._

I've brought you a guest. Isn't that fine? _She gestured to the hollow-eyed man behind her and favored him with a gracious, red-lipped smile, and for an instant, it looked as though her gums were bleeding. Then you blinked, and it was only Mum again._

_You didn't think it was fine at all. He looked thin and haggard, and beneath the cloying odor of too much lavender was the smell of unwashed wool and the piquant stench of sour sweat. You wanted him to go away, but you were only thirteen, and the right of refusal had not been bestowed upon you. That was four years and another reality away, and so you did what was proper and bowed your head._

Delightful, Mummy_. Oh, faithless mouth._

This is Mr. Caddington. He's here to discuss the possibility of Lycanthrope rights with your father.

_The man stepped forward, hand extended, and the displaced air from the motion carried with it the rank whiff of crushing destitution-sweat and urine and onion-peel soup-and when your hand touched his, the flesh of his palm was feverish and grimy and rough as sloughed snake skin. It was like touching a diseased corpse, and the bile rose in your throat_.

Pleasure, sir,_ you murmured, though the words were strangled and clumsy on your tongue. It was not the first lie to ever cross your mind. No, you had committed the sin of bearing false witness a thousand times in the secret halls of your shamed, bitter heart, but it was the first time you had ever given them life, and you exulted even as you waited for your mother to discover the deception. How could she not when those keen, brown eyes caught each slouch, each rounded shoulder?_

Dolores._ Gone was the songbird sweetness of the hostess, and in its place was the ruthless, sibilant hiss of the executioner's blade._

Yes, Mummy? _On the periphery of your vision were the man's shoes, scuffed and cracked and in dire need of a polish, and the threadbare hem of his trouser legs peeking from beneath his robes._

Aren't you forgetting something?_ She peered down the slope of her short, puggish nose, and prim disapproval radiated from her like sickly fever heat. She folded her arms across her breasts and waited._

Yes, Mummy,_ you murmured dutifully, but you made no move rise from the divan. You knew what she wanted. Your fingers curled around the edges of the book as if to anchor you to a pleasanter place._

Well?

_She wasn't going to leave until you paid obeisance to the man in the ragged robes and the social protocol that ruled her life with merciless iron fetters. Leper or lycanthrope, she would see you scrape and bow in the name of propriety. No matter that he was a beast born of tainted blood and slavering jaws in the moonlight. No matter that in a few days, he would be prowling the fetid alleys and heathered moors and baying in the moonlight with saliva glistening from his canines. That he harbored the simmering, illicit urge to tear out innocent, unwary throats and lap the gushing blood. Never mind that he… Most people thought there was naught worse than being touched by a werewolf's caress, but oh, you could think of a few-things that had nothing to do with pulsing exposed throats and everything to do with darker, moister places._

_Your feet felt like cement when you unfurled them from beneath your robes and set them on the floor, and the ground yawed precariously as you rose. You wanted to throw yourself at your mother's glass-slippered feet and beg for reprieve, but you knew it would not come. She could not see. And so you bunched your robes in your hands, crossed your too-thick ankles, and bent your knees to dip low in a perfect curtsey. _

Don't let the mask slip, _you thought feverishly. _You mustn't! He'll see. He'll _smell._ They can smell fear as easily as they can the coppery, salt tang of blood. Quiet, Dolores, quiet.

She made you hold that curtsey until your planted foot throbbed and burned with exertion, and all the while, you could feel the werewolf's gaze lingering on the crown of your head, malignant and leering, and when she finally released you with a clipped nod, you sagged onto the divan and covered your feet again. You pulled the book onto your lap. He might have eyes the better to see you with, my dear, but you were determined that he should see as little as possible.

I thought I'd raised you better, _your mother sniffed coolly, and you knew that retribution for this social breach would come swift and hard, but you hardly cared. Pleasantries thus dispensed with, she would sweep from the room on a noxious billow of lavender and take her foul companion with her._

_Then, she said, _Mr. Caddington, would you care for a drink? Wine? Champagne? Whiskey and rye? We've tea if you've a mind for something more prudent. _She smiled and pressed her fingertips to her throat in a bizarre gesture of feminine fragility. _

_You fought the urge to cackle, blissfully unaware that thirty years hence, it would join the arsenal of sly coquetry deployed against blustering, officious men in tweed suits and lambs' wool robes._

_Mr. Caddington stuffed his hands into the pockets of his trousers and offered her an affable, yellow-toothed grin. _I'd like that very much. Tea with a touch of brandy if you don't mind. It's a bit chill tonight. _He scuffed the brittle toe of his shoes over the carpet, icy wind escaping dying lungs._

That it is. I tell you, the weather gets worse every year. Wouldn't be surprised if it were the fault of Muggles and their nefarious contraptions. They've a right to get on with the business of living, I suppose, the feckless dears, but they are an oblivious lot. _She smoothed her gown with a fluttering hand. _Oh, listen to me, prattling on so. Do forgive me. I'll just see to that drink.

_She glided through the door, and you willed Mr. Caddington to follow and leave you to collect your scattered thoughts, but he didn't. He remained where he was, slump-shouldered and rumpled, looking at you from behind his lank fringe. The mask _did_ slip then, and you were no longer Dolores Umbridge, thirteen and poised on the cusp of womanhood. You were a five-year-old Gretel, lost in a dark and terrible wood, and it took all of your resolve no to bolt from the divan and bury your flushed face and bulging eyes in the voluminous folds of her rapidly receding skirts._

_It was not enough to stifle the mewl that escaped your lips, the single bleat of childish dread. _Mu-

_Her spine stiffened in reproach, but no more, and in a few steps she was swallowed by the flitting, revenant shadows of milling guests and the sussurating murmur of earnest conversation. There was no trail of breadcrumbs to lead you home. You were alone with the bogeyman._

_You stared at him. You didn't want to look; indeed, you would have liked nothing better than to lower your gaze to the book gripped in your trembling hands, but you didn't dare _not _look. You stared and clutched the book and waited to see if the face would change, if it would sink in upon itself like rotten, runnelled fruit and sprout hair like perverse peach fuzz. You waited to see gums shrink from teeth until the canines became dirty, poisonous daggers. You held your breath and listened for the wet, gelid sound of rippling flesh and the clandestine pop of shifting joints. You concentrated until your eyes stung and watered and your vision blurred. Surely a creature so craven as him could not carry on the pretense of civility or even humanity forever?_

_Nothing happened. There was no ravening transformation or tearing of fabric as clothing tore at the seams. He merely regarded you in contemplative silence as he rocked on his heels with the mournful creak of leather. _

_There was a watchful, awkward silence. _So, I hear you attend Hogwarts, _he ventured diffidently. A hand emerged from the pocket of his trousers, and a grimy, rough-nailed fingertip brushed the hank of fringe from his forehead._

Yes. _No sir, not for the likes of him, and your mother was not here to demand it. You tucked your chin to your chest to suppress the smirk that tingled on your lips like the memory of a kiss._

_Another protracted silence, and you could feel his desperation as he cast about for a suitable topic of conversation. _Your mother tells me you're a Ravenclaw. _He harrowed his fingers through his hair and offered you a wan smile._

Yes. _A proud declaration, that. _Third year.

_He cocked a thin, brown eyebrow in surprise. _Only a third year? I never would have believed it, Miss Umbridge. You carry yourself with the grace and dignity of someone much older.

I d, _you nearly blurted, but then you stopped yourself. After all, sputtering in incoherent incredulity was hardly dignified. Or proper. It was childish. Your rounded shoulders straightened, and pride filled your belly like warm treacle. If only you had known. You _should_ have known, given what he was, but pride goeth before a fall. The Muggles got that much right at least. _Thank you.

_Another odd, Mona Lisa smile from Mr. Caddigton, and he loped toward the bookshelves that lined the walls. _Do you like it? _He reached out to trace the cracked spine of a book with his index finger. _

Yes. _You shifted on the divan to keep him in view._

Mmm. Must be a lovely old school, _he murmured wistfully as his eyes roved the ranks of fading and forgotten titles. He craned to examine the contents of the uppermost shelf, and you saw the ring of grit and dead skin caked around his scrawny, wattled neck and the collar of his robes._

_You swallowed a greasy lump of revulsion. _Of course it is. Surely you must remember?

He laughed, a raw, bitter wheeze in the back of his throat, and when he turned his attention to you, his eyes were full of hatred and despair and wretched, aching longing. There was something else, too, something far less noble and pitiable. A glittering, lascivious covetousness. He spun on his heel and strolled toward the divan, chin tucked to his chest and fringe obscuring his eyes in an oily curtain. His stride was languid and loose-jointed, and you watched him come in hypnotized fascination.

My dear,_ he said when he had come to a stop less than three paces from where you sat clutching a book of fairy tales in a vain attempt to anchor yourself to the disintegrating land of rationality, _I never attended Hogwarts. _He cocked his head to jolt the unruly fringe into place again and spared you a feral, toothy grin that turned your stomach to water._

_You did not want to talk anymore. You did not want to be proper. You cast a desperate, wild-eyed glance at the door. Fifteen paces separated you from the threshold and an end to this waking nightmare, and you wondered if you could gain the door before those infectious canines sank into the back of your throat or the bony crest of your shoulderblade or those disease-riddled claws hidden beneath his filthy nail beds shot out to unzip your flesh and spill your entrails onto the carpet like macabre crepe paper. You willed your mother to appear with the tea and take the monster away, but the doorway gave no glimpse of robes and salvation, and for a lunatic moment, you pondered the notion that she had left you alone with the monster wearing Mr. Caddington's skin for some wrong that you had done and then forgotten._

_I do not want to follow this old and cancerous memory any further, _Umbridge thought as she stalked down the corridor. _I refuse to indulge in this pointless daydreaming. It was long ago, and it has nothing to do with Dumbledore or McGonagall or that blasphemous Stanhope child. Leave the bones lie. _Sweat beaded on her upper lip despite the winter chill, and her armpits prickled beneath her robes.

_Oh, but it does, you see, _sneered the voice. _That dusty parlor with the rotting books and the threadbare carpet was where you learned that everything you had ever feared was true, and that there were no princesses in ivory towers and no faraway enchanted lands with crystal castles in the sky. The devil was real, and he smelled like wet dog and unwashed wool. It was where you learned to look for the mark of the Beast. You found it that night, and you've never forgotten it._

_He won in the end, sent you screaming from the room with your ugly hands clapped over your even uglier face, snot on your upper lip and the sound of shattering china in your wake. Your fear of contagion was stronger than your love of staid gentility, and so you ran with the devil at your heels. You locked yourself in the lavatory and vomited until black spots danced before your eyes and the bile was steel wool in your throat, and when your spasming stomach had purged itself, you wobbled to the sink and scrubbed your hands until your fingers bled and the soap sizzled against raw flesh. You had to rid yourself of the blight, wash it from your skin. You washed until no soap remained, an entire bar reduced to a slippery wafer, and you still felt unclean._

_They wept beneath the linens that night, your hands, but you could find no mercy for them. After all, they had exposed you to his sickness with their cowardice, and so you took a perverse relish in driving your nails into raw palm and letting the blood ooze down your wrist in lazy rivulets. When you awoke the next morning, coated in sweat and with your mouth dry as cotton batting, the sheets were stippled with blood, innocence lost under the pitiless watch of the night._

_The pain kept you awake, kept you from the eager arms of Morpheus. You couldn't sleep, not with that stinking saliva drying on your ear and unpleasant possibility creeping beneath your skin. You fingered the shell of your ear until it was as scoured and sensitive as your fingertips, searching for the damnation of dimpled and broken flesh. You traced and prodded until your ear throbbed in protest, and you cursed your mother for insisting that good English girls pierced their ears. It only needed one drop. One drop to get inside and ruin everything._

_So you lay in your bed and clutched the covers to a chest that had not yet blossomed and waited for the infection to take root. You waited for the spit to curdle to brine in your mouth and the moonlight to sear your eyes like the light of a thousand suns. You trembled and waited for bones to warp and shift as they remade themselves in the image of a Roman god with snapping jaws and silver eyes, Romulus, murderer, not of brother Remus, but of Dolores. You trembled and waited for the drugged simmer of bloodlust in your veins, and even as you swallowed the screams that massed inside your chest like the onset of pleurisy, a part of you longed to feel your canines lengthen inside your mouth. You could set the world to rights with teeth like those._

_But nothing happened. When morning came, you were still Dolores, daughter of dreamers, and who inhabited a body running to fat in all the wrong places, still burdened with the responsibility of balancing your parents' madness on your shoulders. You were not cursed, but neither were you free, and it always gave you a small frisson of satisfaction when your mad, spinster aunt tied your ankle to the bedpost with a strand of golden thread. To keep the changeling faeries at bay, she said, but as her dry, old-lady lips brushed your cheek like rotting lace, you remembered hot, meaty breath, and you wondered if you might not awaken to find yourself clicking stealthily through the corridors on furred and padded feet._

She was nearly running now, her steps faltering and graceless. No, not running. Merely walking briskly, efficiently. Yes. Ministerial time was not to be frittered away, as that trollop, Agnes, had so ruefully discovered. Besides, it wasn't proper for a lady to run. She smoothed her hair with her hand and turned her gaze askance so as not to see her trembling fingers. She would not be deterred from her duties as a high-ranking Ministry official by a childhood bogey long dispatched to penniless destitution and death by rotgut whiskey. Even if he had managed to survive grinding poverty and the silver daggers of ruthless werewolf hunters, he was likely ancient and feeble and black-toothed, tottering through the cobbled, twisting streets of some Albanian village and begging alms from the few peasants who had any to spare. He was no threat to her now.

_No, but Dumbledore is, with his political clout and his dangerous, radical ideas. He would let them all in, the beasts and the degenerates and the unnameable things that pollute the darkness with their very breath. He would give them homes and jobs and the right to mingle with respectable citizenry, and he would give them a voice. Those who can speak can rise up, and that cannot be allowed. Not in any sane world. He must be stopped._

"He wears the Mark of the Beast," she muttered as she shouldered past a seventh-year who was flirting shamelessly with a Hufflepuff two years his junior.

_Of course he does. He and his lot, disguising their wanton lust for power and corruption beneath the veneer of reform. You saw what he was long before he lent credence to the crackpot movements to grant lycanthropes greater freedoms and give the Beasts a voice in Wizarding affairs. He threatens all that is decent and proper, and it surprised you not at all when rumors began to circulate that he had given sanctuary to Death Eater filth. He had already opened his arms to werewolves and half-breed giants, and the difference between the Mark of the Beast and the Dark Mark is only semantics. The cunning bastard would bugger the devil to gain his ends. _

The boy looked up as she passed. "Did you say something, Miss Umbridge?" he asked, and grinned.

_Do you mock me, boy? _she thought furiously, and then scoffed at her own paranoia.

Of course he wasn't. He was brownnosing, like as not, hoping to curry future favor with attentive solicitude. She found it both repulsive and admirable. She had never been above the practice herself when the situation called for it.

"No, but thank you for paying mind," she answered.

The boy's affable grin faded, and he peered at her more closely. "Are you all right, ma'am? You look a bit peaked."

"I'm perfectly well," she snapped, and then recovered. "It's been a most trying day. I thank you for your concern, however." She managed what she hoped was a sunny smile, but it felt like a screaming rictus, impossibly wide and lunatic on her face.

The boy opened his mouth to respond, but she turned away and continued down the corridor on legs as nerveless and ungainly as gum rubber. If she opened her mouth again, it would be to scream and howl and gibber, and after the fracas with that leering, misbegotten fetch known as Stanhope, she could afford no more emotional outbursts. If she lost herself again, the Headmaster and his faithful would chivvy her off to the closed ward of St. Mungo's, and she would be left to rot among the human refuse.

The memory of that loathsome child's clammy flesh beneath her clutching fingers sickened her, and she shuddered. She hadn't meant to touch the girl, much less shake her until her teeth rattled inside her thin skull, but that knowing, mocking leer had enraged her, made the blood boil in her veins. That such a mangled, ugly, insolent _thing _should have the audacity to look at her with such open ridicule was an indignity she would not abide. She was an adult of considerable prominence, and she refused to be intimidated by a willful child.

_But you are intimidated. She _offends_. Her very existence offends. She wears a human face, but nothing else is as it ought to be. There is no rosy, youth-kissed bloom in her cheeks. Her hands are twisted and blue-nailed, and they move with the ponderous slowness of anesthetized spiders. She is a porcelain doll fashioned by a madman, and yet there is no humility in that slouch, no apology for her inveterate wrongness. She simply sits there and fixes you with that wobble-necked gaze, unrepentant as sin and just as proud. You look into that bony face and wonder what lies beneath._

_Just like the werewolf,_ she thought suddenly, and the realization was so horrifying that she stumbled and had to steady herself with a palm pressed to the wall. _That same feral, sardonic smile._

She tried to chuckle, but it emerged as a reedy squawk. The string of pearls that had once belonged to her mother tightened around her throat, and her hand closed convulsively around them.

That was what angered you. That smile, spreading slow as arsenic molasses over that pointed face. You'd seen it before, on the face of that mongrel werewolf in the parlor. So smug, so full of fermenting rage and black-blooded contempt. It was the same smile Mr. Caddington gave you when he told you he never attended Hogwarts, and the same one he wore when he leaned close enough so that you could smell meat and blood on his breath and the stink of his disease in the threads of his clothing. It was sly and weighted with a terrible promise.

The words echoed in her ears and heart, the rolling, vibrato creak of crypt doors thrown wide to revealing moonlight. _They wouldn't let me go because they were afraid I'd gobble up the young girls. _A throaty, rusty chuckle brushed the burning shell of her ear, a memory she could not quelch. Hot, sour breath. _And I did._

She clenched her teeth. She _was_ running now, appearances be damned. She did not know why she was reliving these sordid memories, but she would escape them, escape and regain her prized equilibrium. They could not follow her to the Ministry. They never had. The solid, modern walls, unburdened by a thousand years of history, kept them at bay, as did the efficient clangor of Ministry business. The sound of official documents being signed and stamped and the hum and pneumatic hiss of lift doors opening and closing would blot out the memories that rose from the recesses of her mind like peat-blackened bones from a primeval bog.

It would also afford her the opportunity to read the Ministry file on Rebecca Stanhope. For all Dumbledore's twinkling secrecy, there were still immigration policies that even he could not overlook, and the Ministry had received her medical dossier and psychological profile in the weeks before her arrival by Portkey. Fudge himself had read it and signed off on her entry forms, but she was willing to bet he had done little more than skim it while quaffing tea with one of his wealthy constituents. Not one for the minutiae, was Fudge. Perhaps there was something valuable to be gleaned from the pages.

She was so intent upon escaping the increasingly claustrophobic walls of the castle that her surrounding environs had faded to an indistinct blur, and the students through which she threaded were nothing more than darting gnats in her field of vision, points of light and color that buzzed and flitted around her. Only the door mattered now, and it stood in painful relief against the drab fog of grey wall.

Her fingers curled around the heavy iron door handle, and she was already imagining the crisp, lungful of air that awaited her, fresh and cold and unsullied by rancid memories of a life she told herself she had long forgotten. The Scottish fall wind would cleanse her soul and clear her head, and by the time she reached the comforting confines of the Ministry, the sour cramp of unease coiled in her gut would be gone. The prospect of her clean Ministerial office and a cup of hot tea was almost enough to make her smile as she pulled open the enormous door.

But what struck her in the face as she crossed the threshold was not a bracing blast of arctic wind, but thick wool and rosewater and the spicy scent of human sweat. She stumbled back with an unladylike splutter, and her arms pinioned wildly in a losing bid to maintain her balance, but there had been too many afternoon teas and too many tea cakes, and she sat down hard on the unyielding floor with a thump, her robes bunched between her knees. Her clipboard slipped from beneath her armpit and skidded across the floor. It came to rest against the spit-polished toe of a patent leather boot.

"Mind where you tread, you insipid cow," snarled a clipped voice from above her, and the patent leather boot drew back as if to deliver a kick. "-my new waistcoat."

How dare anyone speak to her with such cavalier disregard for her station and official office! She drew herself up and opened her mouth to remonstrate. Then her eyes reached the speaker's face, and the string of intended invective and wounded outrage died in her throat.

Instead, she swallowed an unbecoming squawk of surprise, and said, "Oh! Mr. Malfoy! A thousand apologies. I was in rather a hurry, I'm afraid, and grew a bit careless."

She mustered an ingratiating smile and offered her hand in the hopes that he would help her to her feet and spare here the ignominy of having to struggle to her feet like a wounded wildebeest.

Lucius Malfoy stared down his tasteful, patrician nose at her. "So I see," he replied curtly. He ignored both her smile and her proffered hand.

Her lips puckered in a moue of dismay. This did not bode well at all. The House of Malfoy was the crème of British wizarding society, a shining example of refinement and good breeding. Rumor had it that they could trace their lineage to the time of the Norman conquest, and some said that it could be delineated further still, to the time before written language or even speech, when man had communicated through grunts and gestures and crude pictographs carved into stone. Looking into the Malfoy patriarch's half-lidded, appraising grey eyes, she could well believe it. There wasn't one of them who hadn't married well and increased the family fortune, and in one hundred generations, not one of them had failed to produce an heir.

Whatever the truth of the family tapestry, there was one truth of which she was absolutely certain. Those foolish enough to earn the displeasure of a Malfoy lived to rue it. For a while, anyway. Eventually, they came to an unfortunate and mysterious end, and if she didn't find a way to mend this breach of social etiquette, she would soon find herself picking through the rubbish bins behind the Ministry instead of working within it.

_Damn that child, _she seethed. If she hadn't been so preoccupied with the mangled changeling of Gryffindor Tower, this would never have happened. The child inspired calamity at every turn.

She smoothed her robes and tried another tack. "I'm a bit disconcerted, Mr. Malfoy. Could you perchance help a lady to her feet?"

Malfoy's lip curled in a barely perceptible sneer, and she saw a flicker of contempt in his eyes. He extended one hand, but rather than grasp her fingers, he flexed the fingers of his dragonhide gloves, sniffed disdainfully at the creak of well-oiled dragonhide, and curled his fingers around the gleaming shaft of his walking stick again.

"I've business with the Headmaster," he murmured, and skirted her outstretched hand.

He kicked her clipboard with a nonchalant flick of his ankle. He lifted his boot and inspected the sole for signs that ink had marred it. A long, elegant finger brushed away a piece of microscopic detritus, and then he put down his foot and strode in the direction of the gargoyle that guarded the passage to the Headmaster's office.

"Wh, why I- Mr.," she sputtered in flustered incredulity. She had expected better from the scion of the House of Malfoy.

_While chivalry is clearly dead, now is not the time to mourn its passing, _snapped the ruthless voice of self-preservation inside her head. _If he reaches Fudge with tales of how your bumbling mussed his coat and offended his keen aesthetic sensibilities, your job prospects will be all the slimmer. And if Lucius Malfoy has deigned to set foot on Hogwarts' hallowed grounds, it can only mean that portentous doings are afoot, and it would behoove you to find out what they are._

She scrambled to her feet and hurried after the rapidly retreating figure. "Mr. Malfoy," she wheezed as she lumbered in his wake, and she smoothed her robes with clumsy impatient hands. "Mr. Malfoy, perhaps I may be of assistance."

Lucius Malfoy neither slowed nor turned his head in acknowledgement of her existence.

Discomfited, she tried again. "Mr. Malfoy I'm Dolores U,"

"I know who you are." Bland. Cool. An unmistakable dismissal. His shoes tapped a haughty staccato against the stone.

"Then surely you understand-" she began. There was a note of bleating desperation in her voice now, and she loathed herself for it.

"You forgot your clipboard, Miss Umbridge. I suggest you retrieve it."

For his part, Lucius Malfoy was in no mood to waste his breath on inane banter with one of Fudge's incompetent lackeys. The Umbridges had been unapologetic social climbers for years, drab, inauspicious moths fluttering around the Ministry torches in the hopes that fire would scorch away all impurities and leave magnificent monarch butterflies in its wake. His father and his father before him had endured the scourge of boorish, doughy faces and weak-willed claptrap, and after three generations of relentless glad-handing and toadying, they were still poised on the bottom rung of the social ladder, a fact which testified more eloquently to their worth than any lofty palaver. Stupid and transparent, the lot of them, obvious as Gryffindors in their avarice and unsubtle as Hufflepuffs in their pursuit of it.

His skin crawled beneath the heavy wool of his robes, and he struggled to keep his features impassive. The mouth-breather was still at his heels, tenacious as the onset of malaise, and he could feel the ill health and wheedling degeneracy radiating from her in nauseating waves, a curdled perfume on her wattled neck and bloated wrists. He fought the urge to clamp his handkerchief over his nose and mouth.

_To be fair, she's hardly the only contributor. The entire school is rapidly becoming a cesspool. Even the Slytherin dormitories are no longer guaranteed sanctuaries against the encroaching Mudblood filth._

He could deny neither assertion. Everywhere he looked, there was more evidence of corruption, more proof of the impending collapse of his world. A Hufflepuff stood chatting idly with a group of his fellows, one scrawny digit not so surreptitiously foraging in his nostril, a blind, eager earthworm wriggling on the end of one grubby, broad-palmed hand. Lucius swallowed his offended gorge with a concentrated effort. That his son should be forced to commingle with such crude rabble infuriated him.

_You puling brat,_ he snarled. _Draco was broken of that barbarous habit before he could walk. I placed a drop of concentrated lemon juice on the ends of his fingers, and the next time he took it into his mind to excavate his nasal passages, he learned a lasting and painful lesson. His nose bled from the irritation, and Narcissa shrieked like a deranged harpy when she saw the scarlet rivulets oozing from his raw nostrils like communion wine, but he never picked his nose again. _

His hand tingled with the desire to snatch the boy's finger from his nose and bend it back until it snapped with the satisfying, wet grind of broken bone, but he kept it coiled around his walking stick and marched onward. There would come a time when the old order and respect for the ancient bloodlines would be restored. The corridors would be purged and sanctified once more, and the arcane secrets and intoxicating power of the magical arts would be entrusted to their proper and worthy guardians. Until then, however, he would simply have to grit his teeth and wait.

Umbridge was still trailing him, her reedy breath loud in his ears and sour on his cheek, and he lengthened his stride in an effort to escape. Not too much. A Malfoy seldom ran, and never in these corridors, where his family had walked as lords for generations untold, and where curious eyes still marked his passage with wary reverence. Whatever the starry-eyed do-gooders of the Dumbledore faction might have thought in the privacy of their cloistered offices-no matter their seething envy or their blind, flailing hatred of all he espoused-the unassailable fact remained that the Malfoys were still gods among men and always would be. The knowledge filled him with immeasurable satisfaction.

He willfully ignored the sight of a Slytherin boy tugging vigorously on the crotch of his trousers as he chatted up a slovenly, slack-jawed Ravenclaw with drooping jowls and misaligned eyes, and approached the gargoyle that brooded before the entrance to the Headmaster's eyrie in a posture of eternal truculence and dull-fanged vigilance.

He made a mental note to ask Draco about the boy later and turned to utter the password to the swirling staircase, only to realize that he had no idea what it was. Knowing the old fool, it was something unutterably asinine, a wizarding sweet or ludicrous Muggle toffee of which he had never heard. He opened his mouth to venture a guess, then closed it again. If he were wrong and nothing happened, he would look the fool in front of the goggling student body, and while he gave not a fig for their opinion, the idea of the Malfoy air of omniscience and invulnerability being tarnished for even a moment affronted him. Not to mention the private, obscene glee Umbridge would glean from his befuddlement.

Perhaps she had her uses, after all. He shifted his walking stick from one hand to the other and turned to Umbridge, who was watching him with almost licentious anticipation.

_She knows. She's positively triumphant._

"It's been quite some time since I've been a guest of our venerable Headmaster, and I'm afraid I've forgotten the password." He offered her a tight-lipped smile, fragile as porcelain on his face. "I don't suppose you would be privy to it?" He arched one delicate eyebrow.

Umbridge wrung her hands in delight. "But of course, Mr. Malfoy," she breathed, and the grotesque eroticism of the reply made him flinch.

There was a predatory, calculating flicker in her eyes, and he could see her pondering how best to turn this to her advantage. _You need me, _it said, _and there will be a price. _Were he not in such a hurry, he could almost have admired it. As it was, he merely gazed back at her with bland implacability.

"Well?" Still polite, but brittle now, fraying threads caught betwixt Atropos' gleaming shears. He absently brushed a forelock of hair from his forehead.

She made no reply. Instead, she continued to regard him in thoughtful, reptilian silence. Her fingers intertwined with logy grace. _How much is it worth?_

_Not as much as you think._

He sighed. "Clearly, my initial assessment of your dubious mental acuity was correct." He turned and scanned the gaggle of pupils clustered around the first-floor landing in abysmal attempt at covert surveillance. "Boy," he called imperiously, "what is the password to the Headmaster's office?"

The boy, a Gryffindor, gaped at him in bug-eyed incomprehension.

Lucius trapped a sigh of frustration behind his clenched teeth. "Promptitude is a virtue," he muttered, and quashed the corollary of _you dribbling lackwit_ by the slimmest of margins.

The boy opened his mouth, and Lucius could see the long-disused cogs of his intellect grind as he dredged through the quagmire of lewd fancies and boorish bum humor in search of a suitable response. He settled in for a very long wait.

A hand brushed his wrist, unnaturally dry and far too heavy, and he retreated from the unpleasant touch with a grimace and turned to see Umbridge gazing at him with unsettling eagerness. Her hand reached for his wrist again.

"I am a very busy man, Miss Umbridge." He tucked his near hand behind his back and out of her reach.

"Of course, of course," she simpered, and the oily avarice in her voice was almost enough to coax disbelieving laughter from his throat. "I've only just recalled the password."

He regarded her in expectant silence. Umbridge obviously expected to be lavished with praise for the miraculous recovery of her higher cognitive functions, but he was not in the habit of praising his underlings for their every trifling achievement, or indeed, even their greatest, and he was not about to start now. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and adjusted his grip on his walking stick.

Her smile faltered, and petulance flickered across her face like shadow. It occurred to him as he stood there, carved from alabaster and infinite patience, that she bore a striking resemblance to the leering gargoyle that hunkered before him on its imperturbable haunches. The thought surprised him; such flights of family were for children and wives who flitted from room to room like restless spirits and suffered from fainting vapors. The trek through Hogsmeade must have unsettled him more than he cared to admit. He shook himself and tugged on the thin wrist of his glove.

Umbridge turned to the gargoyle, straightened her shoulders, and said, "Bertie Botts!"

He sniffed. It was as ludicrous as he had feared. The gargoyle smirked at him a moment longer, and then it swung open with the sepulchral scrape of stone and ancient grit. The eternally spiraling staircase beckoned with a sinuous, silent finger.

"There now," murmured Umbridge. The smile had reasserted itself. "Shall we?" She offered him one flabby arm and nodded in the direction of Dumbledore's ivory tower.

He ignored the proffered arm and stepped onto the sliding riser. There were simply certain indignities he was unwilling to suffer even for the Cause. A breathless, glottal sputter from behind him, and then Umbridge followed his ascent.

There were voices coming from behind the Headmaster's door when he arrived at the landing, and from the sound of them, urgent and harried and furious, things were not going at all well. A shout, coarse and brimming with strangled outrage. Fudge, most likely. Much as he despised Albus Dumbledore, he had never heard him raise his voice in anger.

_Of course not. He might be old and full of addle-brained notions of equality and a wizarding republic of liberty and justice for all, but he isn't a fool, no matter how much your idiot son brays to the contrary. One hundred and thirty years of relentless politicking have made him canny to the unwritten rules of bureaucratic gamesmanship, molded him into a consummate showman, and he is not so foolhardy as to tip his hand to Cornelius Fudge._

Another bellow. A thump and the subsequent, mellifluous tingle of wobbling glassware. The good Minister was warming up for quite a row by all appearances. His lips curled in sardonic amusement. The muffled buzz of the Headmaster's reply, and even through ten inches of English oak, the provocative taunt still reached his ears, jovial bonhomie laced with heavy-lidded contempt.

Fudge was in full apoplectic bluster when Lucius opened the door, mottled and bug-eyed and sweating profusely above the collar of his robes. The rim of his offensive, lime green bowler hat was clutched in one white-knuckled hand, and the felt bulged through the gaps in his fingers like a timorous vole. The other hand was raised in a gesture of righteous defiance, one finger pointing stiffly heavenward.

"-told me you would have this matter resolved," Fudge bellowed, and flecks of spittle flew from his lips. "I weary of your games, Dumbledore. I won't be made the fool any longer, do you hear?"

_Too late for that, _he thought wryly, but he remained silent.

"No, no, this won't do at all," Fudge continued. "I told you to appoint an interim Head of House for Slytherin by Monday. Well, that time has come and gone, and I have yet to be informed of a replacement. It is quite clear that you've no respect for my edicts. As such, I have no choice but to appoint one for you." Fudge stopped and glared at his adversary in malevolent, gleeful triumph.

If Dumbledore were perturbed by the declaration, he gave no sign. Indeed, he reached into the pocket of his robes, pulled out a lemon sherbet, and slipped it into his mouth without comment.

"I thought we had settled the matter most satisfactorily, Cornelius," he said at length.

Fudge's jaw unhinged with an audible creak, and for a moment, Lucius was sure he was going to perform a histrionic jig of fury on the carpet.

"What are you talking about?" he hissed.

Dumbledore gave the lemon sherbet in his mouth a thoughtful suck. "I do believe I mentioned Professor Sinistra would be looking in on things from time to time.

Fudge did stomp his foot then. "'Looking in on things' is not the same as the close, intensive guidance provided by a Head of House, and well you know it. Semantic sleight of hand will not avail you now." Fudge kneaded the rim of his bowler hat between his fingers.

"If by 'intensive guidance', you mean ensuring that the thicker ones don't hex each other blind, then I suppose you have a point, Minister," McGonagall said drily.

Lucius started a little at the sound of her voice. He had been so focused on the posturing between Fudge and Dumbledore that he had not noticed her lurking there, tucked unobtrusively between the Headmaster's chair and the bookshelf. He should have known, however; she was never far behind when there was trouble afoot in Dumbledore's fiefdom.

Fudge rounded on her with a snap of starched robe. "I don't recall asking for your opinion, thank you," he snarled.

"I don't give a fig what you asked for. As Deputy Headmistress and Head of House Gryffindor, I'm bloody well going to give it to you," she snapped, and came to stand before Fudge, hands fisted on her hips and her eyes blazing.

Fudge mouthed stupidly for a moment before regaining his customary dubious aplomb. "Now see," he began.

"I've been Head of Gryffindor for thirty-four years, and while I grant you that I've had to break up my share of rows in the Common Room over the years and dispense career counseling and biscuits from behind my desk, I have never felt the need to hold the hands and caress the brows of every Gryffindor in my care as they sallied forth into the land of Nod," she went on, and ignored his feeble interjection.

"Yes, well, you're hardly the picture of maternal sentiment, are you?" Fudge sneered, and Dumbledore coughed behind his loosely fisted hand to hide his cry of surprised pique.

McGonagall's lips disappeared into her blanched face. "And in any case, the Slytherins are notoriously more self-reliant than the other Houses," she said stiffly.

"Precisely my point," Fudge countered. "Their rampant hooliganism has been allowed to continue for far too long, and it's time they were taken in hand."

"Rampant hooliganism?" Lucius repeated. Really, Fudge. Your sweeping denigration of my esteemed House wounds me."

Fudge, who had opened his mouth to continue his tirade, turned his head with an audible creak of tendon, his mouth hanging in a boneless and unbecoming gape, a windup toy that had run down in mid-sentence. McGonagall, too, turned to stare, though he saw her eyes dart toward the Headmaster for the briefest instant.

All the ire promptly left the Minister of Magic in a visible ebb, replaced by obsequious jollity. "Mr. Malfoy! What a welcome and pleasant surprise! To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"On the contrary, I find the Slytherin mindset of independence and resilience a refreshing change from the usual indolent passivity displayed by the populace. Ambition and ingenuity are not always peccadilloes when properly molded. Take my son, for example."

There was a suspicious huff from McGonagall.

"Of course," Fudge conceded eagerly. "Your son is an outstanding example of what can be achieved through attentive parenting. One of young wizardry's brightest."

"The advantages of proper breeding."

Lucius crossed the threshold with a curt nod to the Headmaster and McGonagall, who was tracking his progress with bellicose curiosity, and made his way to the brandy decanter tucked on the table behind the Headmaster's desk. He picked it up, arched an eyebrow in mute inquiry, and then poured himself a tumbler without waiting for an answer.

"Naturally," Fudge was saying now, "but you must concede, sir, that at times it goes to extremes. One must have respect for authority." He massaged the rim of his bowler hat in convulsive circles with the ball of his thumb.

Lucius gave a noncommittal grunt. "If the authority is worthy of it, yes." He took an experimental sip of the brandy and grimaced.

_Cheap swill. Age bringeth not wisdom. Muggle sweets and bathtub gin._

Fudge looked momentarily flummoxed, but said nothing.

Dumbledore surveyed him over the rims of his spectacles. "While the Minister and I are currently at loggerheads over a matter unrelated to your son, I find it altogether fitting that I echo his earlier query. What brings you to Hogwarts, Mr. Malfoy?"

Lucius paused, the tumbler halfway to his mouth, and fixed him with a look of polite incredulity. "I should think that would be rather obvious. Given what's happened to Potter,"

"Who told you about that?" Fudge snapped. Then, as he realized to whom he was speaking, "Erm, well, that is, we wouldn't want to cause panic."

Lucius swallowed a mouthful of the bitter brandy with relish. "I received a letter from Draco with all the relevant details. No doubt other parents have received similar messages from their likewise diligent offspring. Keeping one's parents abreast of important happenings is, after all, good manners, and Draco and I have enjoyed a long and fruitful correspondence."

"I see," muttered Fudge, and Lucius could see the prospect of all those letters filling him with nascent panic.

"I daresay the news of Potter's collapse has spread throughout the Slytherin families, and the histrionic headlines in the _Daily Prophet_ are imminent. I shudder to think what _The Quibbler _will have to say. I'm sure it will be a gaudy sensation, whatever that lunatic dreams up. Think of the bedlam." He swallowed the rest of his brandy with a flourish.

Fudge was now the color of rancid whey, and Dumbledore was gazing at him with an expression of pointed dismay. He tipped his tumbler in a jaunty toast and set it on the Headmaster's desk.

"If I'm not mistaken, Mr. Malfoy, you seem jubilant about the entire affair," Dumbledore said quietly. He had ceased sucking on the lemon sherbet, and the sweet bulged in his cheek, the beginning of a tumor.

"Not at all. I simply thought it best to apprise you of the situation."

"How thoughtful. Will there be anything else? As you have so clearly pointed out, I have a great deal with which to contend and very little time."

Lucius opened his mouth to reply, but Fudge was faster.

"Your unbridled insolence toward me is one thing, Dumbledore, but I will not stand for your rank condescension toward Mr. Malfoy. He has been a generous contributor to the school coffers, and I will remind you that he holds a chair on the Board of Governors. I will therefore thank you to keep a civil tongue."

McGonagall adjusted the clasp of her cloak. "_Held_ a chair, Minister. Unless he has regained the position?" she inquired mildly.

Fudge went from rancid whey to mottled eggplant with alarming speed. "I know bl,"

Lucius held up a gloved hand to stem the flood of indignation on his behalf. He was rapidly running out of time and patience. "I'm moved by your concern, Minister, but I'm afraid there was another reason for my visit. Altruism has never been my strong suit."

"Balderdash," Fudge snorted.

"I had hoped to see my son, to be sure that he wasn't unduly traumatized by recent events."

The lemon sherbet in Dumbledore's mouth drifted to the other cheek. "I'm sure a visit in the Slytherin Common Room can be arranged."

"Most generous of you, Headmaster, but in truth, I thought I might stay a few days to ensure that the environment to which he is being exposed during this trying time is a wholesome one. I haven't spent fifteen years grooming him to be an upstanding citizen just to see him despoiled by a cack-handed former schoolmate."

There was a phlegmatic cackle from Fudge, and Dumbledore's inscrutable countenance darkened.

"I have always found Professor Snape to be a brilliant teacher and an unsurpassed Potions Master," Dumbledore said coolly. "As for an extended stay in the Slytherin Common Room, I'm afraid that would be impossible. Hogwarts' facilities are already overtaxed by the Aurors currently residing on the grounds, and having a parent in their midst would only upset the students' routines still further. I would, however, raise no objection should you elect to take him on holiday."

"How truly noble of you. And I suppose your largesse has nothing to do with the fact your objection would be wholly irrelevant? As his father, I can remove him from the premises whenever I choose."

Dumbledore inclined his head in concession of the point, but McGonagall was glaring at him, disdain etched into every line of her narrow, craggy face.

"That's rich coming from you," sputtered Fudge. "A man with a criminal sequestered in the dungeons telling a father he cannot stay with his child."

Lucius froze in the act of adjusting his gloves. "Professor Snape is still at Hogwarts?" he said sharply, and though his expression betrayed nothing, his mind was racing. "Why isn't he in a holding cell in Azkaban with the rest of the murderous wretches and filthy vagabonds?"

There was a long, uncomfortable silence as each man took measure of the other. McGonagall sidled closer to Dumbledore, and the fabric of her robes twitched as her hand groped among the voluminous folds in search of her wand, and from behind him came the sound of wet, eager breathing. Umbridge still lingered in the doorway, a bloodthirsty voyeur perched on the edge of her seat in anticipation of bloodletting and the roar of the killing lion.

"Precisely my thoughts, Mr. Malfoy. Why let a dangerous predator lurk in the bowels of the castle? It's folly, and,"

"Shut up, Fudge," Lucius said coldly, each word delivered with clipped precision.

Fudge lapsed into immediate and prudent silence.

Finally, Dumbledore said, "Innocent until proven guilty, Mr. Malfoy."

A wry smile. "I see." And he did.

_For fifteen years, the subject of Severus' loyalty has been debated in sussurating whispers and over goblets of wine at lavish fetes. Every word and gesture dissected and analyzed in a search for the barest whiff of treachery, the first signs of cancerous doubt. We have watched and waited and wondered. When he no longer partook of the pleasures offered by struggling, shrieking Muggles or consorting Mudbloods, when he refused to slake his bloodlust at the point of a wand, the speculation rippled through our ranks like a soughing wind. Had you poisoned him against us?_

_I was not unsettled by his lack of enthusiasm for the spoils of a raid. I had never lowered myself to plundering the parted thighs of trembling blood-slick wenches. No rapture in the world was worth the taint such ill-gotten gains left behind, nor was I alarmed when he lost his taste for the snapping of bone or the hot, velvet slide of dagger through tendon. Even death loses its allure for those who live ever in its shadow. I dismissed the rumblings as rumor and petty jealousy that Severus Snape, a Slytherin once too weak to defend himself from the juvenile predations of four obnoxious, uncultured Gryffindor louts, had risen to join the inner circle._

_No, it wasn't his shunning of the Dionysian carnival in which he had once so thoroughly delighted that worried me. Severus had always valued mortification over gluttony. It was the sudden reticence he displayed on those rare occasions when he did indulge in the simple, crude pleasures of his heart. The blade was no longer so swift and sure in his hand, and hesitation replaced rabid, unthinking lust when he knelt between conquered legs. Black eyes no longer lingered over bared and bite-marked breasts and slithered over the flat plane of exposed belly like hot tar over a ravaged landscape. Instead, he closed his eyes and turned his head, and even when he merely watched the revelry of his brethren, shame and abhorrence warred with lurid triumph on his face. The hatred that drove him to claw through the ranks with ruthless efficiency and wrung every drop of mercy from his bones had been diluted._

_Even when the Dark Lord began to doubt, I was not sure. For all His charisma and power, He has made mistakes and questionable decisions before. That sniveling waste of flesh, Peter Pettigrew, crouches and whimpers at his feet like a beaten cur, and he has already proven his disloyalty. He betrayed the men who called him friend, and he will be an albatross ere the end. And the truth was, I didn't _want _him to be a traitor. He_ _was my first disciple and my most avid, and I did not want to admit an error in my trusted judgment. He was mine after a fashion, and I surrender what is mine neither easily nor well._

_But now I know. You who sent Hagrid to Azkaban under the flimsiest of pretenses from the Ministry would protect Severus neither so fiercely nor so well if he were not yours beyond doubt. You have expended better men for less. You sent your sainted James Potter to die in a funeral pyre of thatch and stone for the faint hope that his squalling infant would one day topple your nemesis, and you loved him as a son. The prodigal son has turned away, and he will not come home again._

"I have every intention of visiting my son." He smoothed his robes. "Perhaps we can reach an agreement."

Dumbledore stiffened, and the sweet in his mouth crunched with an audible grind of teeth, bones in the crushing jaws of a powerful predator. "I think not, Mr. Malfoy." Unyielding as tempered steel.

Fudge drew himself up. "As Minister of Magic, I'm overriding your decision, Headmaster, and granting Mr. Malfoy permission to remain on the Hogwarts grounds for as long as he sees fit until this crisis is resolved," he declared, and jammed the misshapen bowler hat onto his head as though that settled that matter.

"You've no right!" McGonagall thundered.

"Either Mr. Malfoy remains, or Snape goes to Azkaban, life debt be damned." It was almost a whisper, but Fudge's face was a florid mask of deadly resolve.

Lucius saw the conflict raging behind the Headmaster's carefully sculpted artifice, and in the moment before he replied and the battle of wills was decided, he had epiphany. Albus Dumbledore, virtuous Gryffindor, Father Christmas with malice toward none, despised Cornelius Fudge. Those long, nurturing fingers that had planted seeds of wonder in the fertile minds of generations of pupils longed to crush the life out of one of them. That he was capable of the basest of human emotions filled Lucius with satisfaction and a perverse sense of relief.

_What's this? The golden lion with paws of clay?_

After an interminable pause, Dumbledore spoke. "Very well. If you can find nowhere else, I'm sure Hagrid will have room to spare."

McGonagall erupted into an inexplicable coughing fit.

_I would sooner sleep at the bottom of the lake than share lodgings with that thundering oaf. No telling what vermin nest in that unkempt hair and beard of his. If worse comes to worst, I'll claim Draco's bed and exile him to the hearth rug. Might do him good to experience barbarous privation._

"Splendid." He turned to Fudge, who was still basking in the afterglow of his all-too-rare victory over Dumbledore. "I can lay claim to modest influence over the other prominent Slytherin families. Perhaps I can persuade them to forebear on passing the announcement of Potter's misfortune to the press for the time being."

Pathetic relief flooded Fudge's face. "I would be forever in your debt, Mr. Malfoy," he gabbled, and Lucius was tempted to point out that he was already in his debt countless times over.

"I quite understand, Minister." He extended his hand. "I can make no promises; contrary to popular opinion, we Slytherins do not share a hive mind."

Fudge gripped his proffered hand in sweaty, clutching fingers and laughed too heartily and too long, a loud, braying guffaw that made his ears ring. "Indeed, Mr. Malfoy. Your assistance is most appreciated."

He extracted his hand from Fudge with a grimace disguised as a polite smile. "Headmaster. McGonagall."

He crossed the room and paused in the threshold of the doorway to gaze at Dumbledore one more time, one hand on the doorknob.

_I know, old man, and sooner or later, I will depose you and claim your throne. You may have experience, but I have the advantage of youth, and even you must eventually wither. If you still draw breath when I take what is rightfully mine, each stripe I earned in Azkaban will become yours, and I will watch you grovel at my feet._

Then he was gone, in search of his son and eager to have a word with his informant before supper.


	51. And the Old Days Shall Pass Away

Chapter Fifty-One

"Where is it?" A whisper in the shadows.

"Where is what?" The sussurating purr of tearing paper.

"The glorious artefact that will change our fortunes in this war." A gloved hand disappeared into heavy wool robes and reappeared a moment later, holding a piece of parchment. "You do remember, don't you? Indeed, you were quite insistent that I come as quickly as possible."

A muffled crunch, like gravel trod underfoot. "Ah, that. Yes, I remember, but I fear there has been a misunderstanding."

"A misunderstanding?" Sharp, the indignant hiss of a striking asp. "My time is valuable, and I do not take kindly to wasting it. If you have nothing to report, you sniveling dolt, then why, pray, did you see fit to summon me to this derelict heap of stone?" There was the furtive rustle of shifting fabric, and a silver serpent gleamed in the wan torchlight, bright as quicksilver against the whorling darkness of the room.

Hands rose in a placatory gesture. "I never said there was nothing to report. Merely that there has been a misunderstanding." The voice was amused, but freighted with the full knowledge of whom it was addressing.

An irritated snort. "Then stop this coy dithering and report, you miserable fool. You're beginning to sound like the muddled, self-righteous master you serve." The grate of expensive sole on grit and stone.

"I serve only one." Indignant.

"Indeed you do." A mirthless, tight-lipped smile. "Just like the rest of us." The silver serpent retreated into the darkness.

The other made no answer.

"Now, tell me why you've brought me here, and no more tiresome games of semantics and clever rejoinder. I don't pay you for your wit."

"Of course." A hand gestured to a decanter on a cabinet behind the threadbare sofa. "Brandy, Mr. Malfoy?"

Lucius grimaced. His stomach, accustomed to the finest life had to offer in both food and spirits, was already protesting the cheap swill he'd imbibed in Dumbledore's office. Any more bin booze, and he might find himself ensconced in one of the school's primitive lavatories, robes hitched around his waist while his bowels purged the taint from his system and his mortified mind prayed that no bumbling prefect opened the door at an inopportune moment and saw him in disarray. A Memory Charm would be the least of the unfortunate twit's woes.

"No. I've had quite enough of Hogwarts' famed hospitality," he said drily. "Now stop hedging and tell me what you know."

A shrug from the figure behind the desk. "Suit yourself," came the mild reply. A chair scraped as the figure pushed away from the desk.

Lucius watched his comrade cross to liquor cabinet in silence. Good genetics had gifted him keen eyesight, and he needed very little light in order to follow the deliberate, laconic movement of callused hands as they set a tumbler down with surprising delicacy and unstoppered a decanter fashioned of cheap glass.

"Your taste is abominable," he muttered.

His companion chuckled. "As are my wages."

"If you are referring to what I pay you," he said curtly, "you are lucky to get so much as a Knut, for all the good you've done me."

The tumbler bobbled as his companion chuckled again. "Indeed." The tumbler disappeared into the gloom, presumably on a path to unseen lips. "If your hair didn't belie your lineage, your insufferable arrogance would. You Malfoys have always thought the world revolved around you. Wouldn't be surprised if you though the Earth spun because you trod upon it." The tumbler reappeared once more, divested of more than half its contents. "I was talking about the pittance paid me to teach the wizarding world's great new hope, unenlightened and disinterested as they are."

Lucius refused to rise to the glaringly obvious barb. He had played this game of politics and gamesmanship for far too long to be distracted from his purpose by such unsophisticated and juvenile truculence, and if he did say so himself, he played it better than most. He was, after all, a Slytherin.

_And a Malfoy, _he thought smugly, and toyed with the clasp of his cloak, a wrought-silver serpent coiled around its mate in a sinuous, possessive embrace.

The decanter rose again.

"I should think that would hardly be advisable in your condition," he said lightly.

"So I have been told."

"As for your salary, I must confess I never saw much use for your subject as a boy."

There was a thoughtful pause, followed by another muffled crunch. "I daresay it had little use for you, Mr. Malfoy, if your marks were any indication. You couldn't bear to face the fact that all that you touch did not turn to gold, and when you realized that the numbers would by swayed by neither the family name nor its coffers, you simply blotted it from your consciousness like a dream best forgotten. If you could not master it, then it was of little importance, a discipline to be cast aside like an unwanted plaything. A Malfoy mastered all that mattered in this world."

The darkness may have hidden the sly smile, but it did nothing to conceal the bitter, leering triumph he heard in that voice, and his hand itched to lash out and strike, to wipe the smirk from a face he could not see and make blood bead on cracked lips as proof of vengeance exacted. He swallowed an oath and curled his fingers tightly around the worn armrest of his chair.

_One day, when you have outlived both your usefulness and my patience, you will assume your rightful place at my feet, licking my boots and writhing like the spineless wretch you are. I will have you flayed by inches and savor every scream I tear from your throat. Like my father and his father before him, I have kept an account of every slight, even unto the most flippant of jibes, and there will be a reckoning. Enjoy your forked tongue while you can._

"Your insouciance bores me," he said coldly.

His compatriot affected not to hear him. "Don't take it so badly, Mr. Malfoy," the figure clucked sympathetically. "Your casual dismissal of any discipline you could not best or bend to your will was a trait shared by your dearly departed father. And Draco, of course."

He had never considered his father's scholastic aptitude, and since the bastard was long moldering in his tomb, he could hardly find it within himself to care, but when it came to his only son and heir, he had to concede the point. While it was true that Draco was second in the school on the basis of his marks, the fact remained that he was consistently outshone in his efforts by a mewling, presumptuous Mudblood girl who thought she had the same right to walk these corridors as Purebloods of fifteen generations. He was not about to say so, however.

He withdrew his wand and walked it betwixt his fingers with nonchalant grace. "Though I am delighted that you are well-versed in the studious endeavors of both my forefathers and my progeny, I suggest we move at once to the matter at hand." His tone was one of light amusement, but the levity did not reach his eyes. They were hard and predatory and smoldered with unspoken malice.

"Of course, Mr. Malfoy." All traces of humor had vanished.

"Splendid." He gestured to the chair opposite him.

A hand reached for the decanter. Lucius' wand shot out with a flick of one fine-boned wrist. "Ah, ah. I should think not. One more sip of that abominable rotgut, and you will be mourning the loss of your fingers."

The hand made a prudent withdrawal, and his companion stepped into the wan torchlight. He was pleased to see wariness etched into their features, and vague disquiet. Not fear-cowed as they were by the prospect of untold wealth and unrivaled power, they were too hardened by a lifetime of harsh realities to cower as so many others had done-but prudence born of long experience. Eyes followed the tip of his wand as he flicked it impatiently toward the chair.

_For all your bluster, you've not forgotten the old respect, have you, old…friend? No, that's not the mot juste, but it will do for now. You still remember the deeds of which a Malfoy is capable, acts so profane they are not spoken of even in hushed whispers. Good. All the better for you. Our wands are sharper and deadlier than any blade, and our knowledge of hexes and Curses extends far beyond that of even the most prominent Pureblood families. They are spells writ, not in books with crumbling pages, but in blood, in family lineages older than recorded time. What I could do to you with this wand would make war-weary veterans gibber with madness, and you know it. Only Lord Voldemort could do better._

_Maybe not even he, _a sibilant, triumphant voice amended. _His blood may be pure, but it's not Malfoy._

A smile flitted across his face at the thought. "No need for shame," he murmured. "Better men than you have paled before this wand, and with good reason, I assure you. We Malfoys, you'll find, can be quite persuasive."

"Indeed," came the bland reply, but the figure moved no closer to the chair.

A memory arose in Lucius' mind of himself as a young man. During the summer holiday, he and his Slytherin peers would spend hours in the gardens of Malfoy Manor, practicing both Curses and manual dexterity by killing voles and chipmunks. He, Constantinius Rookwood, older brother of Augustus, and young men whose faces had blurred into insignificance with the passage of years, would stand beneath the shade of an oak tree and draw down death with cruel precision.

He did not remember everything about those afternoons, but it was funny the things he _could _recall. The heavy heat of high summer. The itch of wool against his shoulders. The cool prickle of sweat beneath his armpits and on the nape of his neck, drying to brine in the hair there. The poetry of ancient Latin spilling from voices that had not yet found their way to manhood, spells forgotten by even the foundation stones of Hogwarts. The throb of forbidden magic, virulent as pus beneath the skin, as it raced from throat to chest to aching fingertip, and the acrid, ozone stink of it as it exploded from his wand and arced across the grass, the righteous finger of Fate racing to dispense justice. The scorched grass it left in its wake, and the giddy, almost orgasmic rush he had always felt when the Curse struck home in a gout of blood and fur and pulverized bone. The residual magic that clung to his wand like static electricity, and the triumphant laughter of his fellows at his kill. A platinum god claiming his own tribute.

But what he remembered most were the eyes of the voles in the instant before the end came and they were reduced to so much twitching fur upon the grass, the exquisite awareness of the predator in their midst as they crouched before his wand and his pitiless, grey eyes; the terror in their eyes had been strangely human, and more than once, it had given him pause as the wand swung down and his lips prepared to deliver the terrible invocation. Not out of mercy, but curiosity. What did it think when confronted with the imminence of its mortality? Did it truly understand, or was it merely a primitive, instinctive reaction? Not that it mattered. They died all the same, and he would stand over the cooling, tattered corpse and still-quivering entrails and watch the spark of animus bleed from their eyes.

_Even the dumbest brute can smell death on the air, boy, _sneered his father's voice, and he blinked to silence it.

His companion reminded him of the hapless voles he had slaughtered, frozen in the dim patch of light, one foot flat on the floor and the other poised delicately on point of the toe, nostrils flaring, a rabbit kit that has fallen under the shadow of the hawk, but cannot yet see it. It was balletic and almost beautiful.

A last longing glance at the decanter, and feet shuffled toward the armchair with a desultory, cautious tread. Another crunch like falling pebbles.

"As I said, the numbers can reveal much," the informant said as they took a seat. "In this case, I believe they may have revealed an entirely new discipline of magic. It's certainly one I've never encountered before, and I've been in the field for almost forty years." Fingers threaded together over a thin chest.

"Given that wizards can live for two hundred years and work for most of them, your tenure is hardly a feat," he observed drily, but he was intrigued nonetheless. He leaned forward in his chair. "What sort of magic have you found?"

"I can't say precisely." A careless shrug. "As I told you, I've never seen its like before. What I can tell you is that it involves Runes and Cryptology and perverts the established laws of Arithmancy in ways I can't fathom. At least, the formulae I've seen did."

Lucius stared in frosty skepticism. "If I remember correctly from my own brief stint in the discipline, while the means of reaching a desired calculation are somewhat malleable, the art is subject to certain immutable absolutes. One plus one is always two, for example."

A wry smile. "Except when it isn't," came the sly retort.

Lucius scoffed. "And when, pray, would that be?" He was tempted to raise his wand again and quell his companion's renewed sense of comfort before it took root, but for the time being, it rested lazily on one knee, cradled loosely between palm and fingers.

His companion chuckled. "One plus negative one is zero. A perfect balance."

"I see," he said irritably, discomfited that he had missed such a clear exception. "Such exceptions are rare," he muttered.

"Not so rare as one might imagine. Truth be told, Mr. Malfoy, numeric value only exists because we say it does. If someone opened up their hand to show us an empty palm, and then had the temerity to tell us that he was, in fact, presenting us with _less_ than nothing, we would call him a madman, yet we allow for negative integers and accept them as real."

"Or Albus Dumbledore," Lucius muttered, and grimaced.

The figure snorted. "Quite so."

"And the point of all this theorizing?" he prompted.

"In addition to the negative integers, which are a manmade construct, but rational numbers for all of that, we have what are known as irrational numbers-fractions and the like. These are also accepted by tacit social agreement because we have no other means by which to define that which is less than a whole, but more than none, or that which is less than nothing, but which must exist by mandate of the mathematical systems. These, too, are used in Arithmantic constructs, though much less frequently, as they are unstable." His companion was in full swing now, and excitement radiated from pores like sour sweat. Fingers drummed on the armrests of the chair, and voice had assumed the stentorian, commanding timbre of the practiced lecturer.

Lucius' eyes glazed at the uninviting prospect of a protracted lecture; when he had received the owl informing him of the secret weapon that would change their fortunes in the war against the Ministry and Dumbledore's Knights of the High Table, his mind had whirled with visions of exotic poisons and Dark spells found in rotting tomes bound in human flesh and stinking of putrefaction and untold millennia. At his most mundane, he had entertained the notion of a heretofore undiscovered version of the Imperius Curse, one not bound by Ministerial strictures. Such a spell could prove useful, especially if it could be permanently affixed to its intended target without the risk of dementia and brain damage that rendered so many amanuenses useless after prolonged exposure. He had not envisioned passing the evening with a discourse on the finer points of Arithmancy.

_Your father always said you indulged in too much fancy, let your imagination run amok, _sneered a voice inside his head. _You, with your fantasies of secret sects and blood-bound brotherhoods and elaborate rites in labyrinths beneath the earth. How disappointed you were when you learned that once the thrill of initiation had worn off, being a soldier for the Cause was as much meetinghouse politicking as it was midnight raids on the homes of your enemies._

_Yes, well, if my father had been possessed of a bit more imagination and foresight, perhaps he would not have wound up facedown in a bowl of porridge. The fool was too arrogant to consider the possibilities and forgot the lessons he so ruthlessly taught me._

His expression must have betrayed him, because his companion offered a sardonic smirk. "Am I straying too far afield from your level of expertise, Mr. Malfoy?"

They were, but he was loath to concede as much to this bottom-feeding Pureblood whose family had squandered their meager social prestige with years of unwise investments and questionable social alliances, and whose loyalty had been bought by a few hundred Galleons and the promise of more to come when victory had been assured.

He drew the ball of his thumb over the smooth, flat head of the serpent atop his cane. "Tell me," he said, "how is your sister these days? The one with the unfortunate child. Hare-lipped, wasn't he? Or was he mongoloid?" Each word was nightshade silk across his tongue, cold and scalding as liquid nitrogen. He smiled blandly, a fleeting, cruel upturn of one corner of his mouth. "I'm afraid you've not been keeping us apprised of his situation." He clucked ruefully. "Pity, that."

All the color drained from the informant's face, and in the blink of an eye, a human being became a wax effigy of utter mortification. "You know damn well I don't speak to her. Haven't done since she birthed that whelp." A tremulous rasp. The upholstery creaked as fingers convulsed around the fabric.

"Of course not. No sane man would," he conceded. "But that's what happens when one consorts with Muggles."

There was a strangled snort that he took to be agreement.

"A few of us have wondered, however, why you continued to associate with her after she married." The finger on the serpent head paused in mid-stroke, and he quirked a brow in polite inquiry.

"Because she was my sister!" Spat, furious. Then more calmly. "I had hoped she would realize her folly and renounce the bastard before it went too far."

Lucius sighed. "Alas, she did not."

"No," came the snarled retort.

"Has she been erased from the family history, then?" The finger resumed its ceaseless stroking.

A brusque nod. "Yes. Mother Lucretzia saw to it herself."

That revelation surprised him not in the least. Lucretzia was surpassed in Pureblood fanaticism only by mad Juno Black, and there were those who claimed she had no rival.

"Thank Merlin for that," he murmured. "It wouldn't do for people to get the mistaken impression that you have anything to do with the blood traitor and the puling imp she spawned."

"Who's been spreading such pernicious rubbish? And what's my sister and her familial blight have to do with the matter at hand?" Shrill now, on the knife edge of panic.

Lucius offered no reassurance. He merely offered another haughty, tight-lipped smile.

_So you do have a weakness. I thought as much. Your family ties will bind you to your doom, throttle you as surely as if they were but extensions of the Dark Lord's crushing fingers. I know of every letter you've sent, every parcel of food, every charitable Knut wrapped in a scrap of old robes. I made it my business to know, and what I have missed, MacNair and the elder Goyle have not. I am His eyes and His ears, and I have spared Him not the smallest detail. When the time comes, your sister and her misbegotten pup will drown in the well as they should have done from the moment she abandoned our world for that damned Muggle. Your death will be neither so merciful nor so swift, and as your ashes smolder beneath the guttering sun, I and Mother Lucretzia shall dance upon your fading, worthless memory._

He shifted in his seat. "Now, you were enlightening me as to the various mathematical systems used in Arithmancy?" he prompted. Now that he had re-established tactical superiority, he could steer the conversation into more germane waters once more. If the idiot didn't come to the point in the next few minutes, he would simply dispense a brief and exquisitely painful lesson from the end of his wand and go in likely fruitless search of suitable lodgings.

His informant gaped at him, discomfited by the abrupt change of subject. "Y-yes. Yes. So I was." A silence as thoughts and composure were gathered and reassembled with painstaking care. "If I recall, we-I-was discussing the irrational system as opposed to the rational."

"Indeed," Lucius agreed, though the answer would have been the same had his companion announced they had been discussing the weather or page three hundred and seventy-four of the _Wizarding Kama Sutra._ He had long since lost interest in this conversation.

"Irrational numbers, by virtue of their…irrationality are seldom used in calculations, though there are accounts of formulae being successfully written and executed by Dark wizards; most find the end results too unpredictable for their liking. But if one is willing to take the risk, the rewards are unimaginable."

"Mmm." Lucius shifted again.

"I see I've failed to capture your attention."

"Frankly, I don't see what any of this has to do with your purported unclassified magic," he said flatly, and stretched his legs. The tendons of his knees creaked and popped in protest.

"Don't you?" The informant sat forward, hands folded and elbows trapped between knees, and the wan face was alive with triumph. "The rules of Arithmancy have long been held forth as sacrosanct, inviolate lest meddling destroy all that man has wrought through the sleepless centuries. Time and time again, we have been warned of the consequences of avarice and unchecked curiosity. 'Look to the future, but do not touch. Look to the past, but change nothing, lest you change everything.'"

"The butterfly effect," he said absently.

The sharp crack of clapping hands. "Precisely! Precisely, Mr. Malfoy." A gruff cackle. "But what if it were all rubbish? What if the dire warnings and ominous predictions of doomsday were ploys designed to keep us from the truth for fear that those who discovered it would become more powerful than even the Fates in the firmament, the ruse of a jealous god determined to keep us from paradise?"

It was a reference he could not quite place, and yet it made his stomach roil, and from the deepest recesses of his mind came the hot throb of wounded kidneys and the sudden warmth on his thighs. A sound that reminded him of onrushing consequence, and the sound of wood on flesh, a gourd dropped onto paving stones. A flare of agony remembered, there and gone before it truly registered.

_Get up, boy. _The savage, capering devil that wore his father's patrician face.

The air caught in his throat in a sticky, choking clot, and he was certain he was going to vomit. His first instinct was to lean forward and press his burning forehead to his knees, but to do so in front of his mewling subordinate would be to show weakness, expose his belly to a man unworthy of licking his boots, and his fierce pride would not allow it. He stiffened his spine, clenched his teeth, and fumbled for his handkerchief with as much nonchalance as he could muster.

"After all, it makes sense when you consider that wizards once served Muggle kings," his companion prattled, heedless of the fact that his face was an ugly, mottled red. "Their position in the court was tenuous at the best of times. If someone were to prove better at the art of Arithmancy, the hapless wizard would soon find himself replaced and consigned to the gallows. What better way to cement one's position in the royal court than to invent a system of thou-shalts and shalt-nots that allows for effective practice of the discipline, but limits the power of the practitioner?"

"Blood traitors," he muttered thickly, and continued to fumble inside his robes for his handkerchief, which stubbornly eluded his grasp.

"Quite," his companion said dismissively. "But as distasteful as bowing and scraping to Muggle monarchs may have been, it's hardly relevant at the moment. What _does _matter is the possibility-dare I say, probability-that the rules are vestigial and easily exploited."

"Loyalty to blood always matters," he said weakly, and closed his eyes against a wave of vertigo.

"Naturally, Mr. Malfoy, but-," A pause. "Are you well, Mr. Malfoy? You look flushed."

"The swill in Dumbledore's office has disagreed with me, I'm afraid," he muttered. At long last his fingers closed over the elusive fabric of his handkerchief, and he withdrew it and pressed it daintily to his too-dry lips. "Do you think you might come to the point?"

"Ah. Yes." His companion cleared their throat behind loosely-fisted fingers. "The point is, Mr. Malfoy, that if the rules are little more than the archaic artifice of ancient wizards looking to protect their power and keep their necks from the royal noose, imagine what could be accomplished by someone brazen enough to disregard them."

Lucius let the hand holding the handkerchief drift dreamily to his lap. "And what might that be?"

"The possibilities are endless. Arithmancy by itself can manipulate matter to varying degrees. Indeed, the argument could be made that the whole of the universe was birthed from a Divine algorithm. Control the numbers, and the world is yours."

Lucius straightened, nausea and dizziness swept aside by dawning comprehension. He crushed the handkerchief between his fingers as his nerves thrummed with excitement and adrenaline flooded his veins. "If the numbers can be controlled, why hasn't anyone done so before? You make it sound as though a child could do it, and yet, of all the great Arithmancers of the ages, none has attempted it."

A sardonic chortle. "Because it countermands the _rules_, Mr. Malfoy, and we wizards are an orderly lot."

He couldn't argue with that. He had spent a lifetime watching is disgust as wizardkind muddled through its existence, looking to the dangers in their midst with a bovine contentment, ignorant or simply heedless of the wolves that waited to attack with snapping jaws. Wizards who ought to know better had traded vigilance for stupefied complacency, eager to surrender power for the illusions of unity, bucolic peace, and progress. Warnings were disregarded, and opinions were formed not by the painful lessons of history, but by the pompous bombast and rhetoric of empty-headed politicians. Each day, the world he knew and was destined to rule by virtue of his birthright withered a little more, undercut by the poisonous idealism of Mudblood inclusion and Beasts' rights, and because both larders and purses were full, no one cared.

_Like Hogsmeade. It was built as a haven against the creeping Muggle threat, the only ground for a thousand miles not seeded and hallowed by the blood and ash of wizards murdered in a frenzy of pitchfork tines and licking flames, and only the wards erected by the prudent spared it from the same fate. But the lesson has been forgotten. The screams that have echoed through the centuries as grim reminders of the cost of apathy have been blotted out by the merry clink of Galleons in the till, and there has even been talk of end the segregation between Muggles and wizards, a notion that-thank Merlin- is still too radical for even the most liberal wizard. But it's only a matter of time. The old guard is dying, and the young do not understand, raised as they have been in comfort and security. Within a generation, or perhaps the next…_

He pulled himself from his reverie with a discreet shudder. "I suppose you have found a way around the rules?"

"No. _I _haven't. I'm as hidebound and paralyzed by the potential consequences as the next wizard, but I've found someone who isn't." A triumphant, toothy smile.

His heart began to pound inside his chest, and his fingertips tingled with sudden anticipation, silk drawn briefly over the unsuspecting pads. "Who?" he demanded sharply. Then, more casually, "An ambitious Slytherin? It would prove refreshing to see that my House still turns out wizards worthy to walk beneath our honored founder's banner."

The reptilian smile faded. "I'm afraid not."

"Pity. It's been far too long since Slytherin youth have demonstrated any promise. It's enough to make one wonder just what Severus has been teaching them." A wry smile at his own sly wit.

_Ah, but that question will be answered soon, will it not? That is, after all, why you have come. To see where Severus' loyalties lie. That he still resides within these walls and not within the moldering, timeless confines of Azkaban is an unexpected boon. It will make your investigation all the easier. If the cunning bastard did poison Potter as your starry-eyed son insists, he will live, and Cornelius Fudge, that bumbling lackwit that has troubled you for so long, will suddenly find his life exceedingly unpleasant, but if, as you suspect in the fertile ground where all your basest and most dreadful suppositions lie, that he has truly become Dumbledore's puppet, he will meet a worse end than even the Dementors could offer. Oh, he will die just as slowly, it's true, but neither your wand nor your blade will offer the blissful, narcotized numbness of a soulless existence. They will flay him by inches, and he will feel every last cut._

The more pragmatic part of him hoped it wouldn't come to that. Severus was among the last of the old Slytherin guard, the last generation nurtured in the ways of propriety and good conduct. He knew how to treat both his betters and the simpering inferiors that cowered at his feet, undisciplined curs licking the boots of their master. His knowledge of Hogwarts and the tedium of school administration would make the transition from Dumbledorian enclave to preeminent Pureblooded wizarding school in the world all the easier, and for all his swagger and sneering arrogance, he would be more easily controlled than an ambitious young upstart with delusions of grandeur. All one had to do was show a little appreciation.

A wistful pipedream. The same qualities that made Severus an outstanding Slytherin also made him a liability and a threat to his designs. The man may have been unkempt, sullen, and boorish, but he was possessed of an unrepentant pride and a cunning Salazar Slytherin himself would have envied. He had a knack for overhearing conversations best left undiscovered and unreported, and those merciless, unreadable black eyes saw through the cleverest of pretenses with disturbing acuity. And for all his protestations of living only to serve the Cause and His Lordship, Lucius knew that Severus would like nothing better than to stand astride the world and crush his enemies beneath his heels. It was the dream of every Slytherin ever passed through the House's frozen, stone womb, and the fire for conquest and retribution burned in every belly. A Slytherin child's first breath was little more than a war cry, and Lucius could hardly begrudge Severus his dreams.

They were his dreams, too.

He could, however, begrudge him his decision to sell his soul and his House to Dumbledore, that silver-bearded Svengali who hypnotized the unwary with his jovial blue eyes and his proffered bowl of sweets stretched forth like temptation. Father Christmas with a strychnine smile and the empty platitude of salvation through acceptance. He had tried to lure them all, but almost to a man, the sons and daughters of House Slytherin had resisted with stiff-necked obstinacy. They had stood resolute even as Gryffindor and Hufflepuff and even Ravenclaw, that House of geniuses, had capitulated to the siren song of laissez faire.

Even Severus had withstood the first sly overtures, a grimy, dirty-necked boy who smelled deceit in the air like woodsmoke and tasted it on his tongue like copper and blood, and Lucius, seven years his senior, had stood in awe of him, but he had fallen in the end, weakened by the predations of Azkaban and Ministry officials and seduced by the scraps of praise tossed him by his doddering puppetmaster.

_Of course he fell. Dumbledore told him everything he wanted to hear, made him think he was worth more than his tarnished family name and his tatty clothes made of the cheapest wool. He soothed all the deep, festering wounds with the balm of useless absolution. He made Severus believe that his was the only way to absolution, that the blood on his hands and drying beneath his ragged fingernails could be washed away by betraying us all. And Severus, whose cheeks have never stopped burning with the secret shame of not good enough, took the bait, just like he did when I offered him my hand twenty years ago. _

_Severus wasn't the old man's only quarry. He tried for you all those years ago, laying his snare as he had for so many others. He thought he could tempt you with promises of leadership and the fulfillment of leading a life well lived. He underestimated your resolve, your loyalty to your blood, and your palm still prickles with the memory of the slap you laid across his cheek for daring to suggest that being a man of eminence among the diseased rabble of Mudbloods, Squibs, and Muggles was a laudable end. He still remembers it, too, which is why those eyes dim and those lips thin whenever you cross his threshold. He remembers, and the defeat is bitter in a mouth accustomed to only victory._

Unexpected warmth tickled his palm, and he squeezed his handkerchief to banish it. "Who, then?" he asked.

There was an uncomfortable, sullen silence as his companion shifted in the chair. "A Gryffindor." The silence resumed, heavier than before, as though the word uttered had been heretical and profane.

He scoffed. "Only that? Useful Gryffindors are rare, I concede, but not unknown. Need I remind you of Pettigrew?" He grimaced. Pettigrew always made his stomach roil, and the moment it was no longer a lethal blunder to do so, he would begin lobbying for his quiet elimination.

Still the silence persisted. The shift of heavy winter robes. The hiss of tearing paper. A grating, muffled crunch. "Erm, it's not just any Gryffindor, you see." The creak of a chair.

"Any Gryffindor?" he spat contemptuously. "You act as if they come in assorted varieties, like sweets or Bertie Botts' beans. Don't be a fool. There hasn't been a Gryffindor worthy of the name since accursed Godric took it with him to the dust. Unless, of course, you've succumbed to the feverish delusion of P-,"

He stopped in horror. A terrible supposition was forming in his mind, rising to the surface of his consciousness, scum on the surface of a noisome bog. He brought the handkerchief to his lips to stifle an acidic burp. His stomach, which had begun to settle, began to churn with renewed unease.

"You don't mean Potter, do you? If you've brought me here to tell me that puling brat is the key to our utter victory, so help me, I'll remove your intestines through your nostrils." His wand, dormant and unassuming when it had lain carelessly in his palm, now bristled with potent menace as he pointed it at the unmoving figure in the opposite chair.

The idea had a nauseating probability the longer he considered it. The boy had been nothing but trouble since the day he'd emerged from between his mother's trembling, blood-smeared thighs. The Dark Lord had invested all of his resources in finding the princeling that could so easily depose him, and when the infant Messiah had been found, he had reduced the most powerful wizard in the world to an impotent revenant bereft of purpose or authority, left to wander the forests of Albania and draw sustenance from the dead and dying. With neither wand nor blade, he had felled the dark and terrible god and scattered His foot soldiers to the wind. He was anathema to all who served the Cause, and his name was an epithet cast at the feet of dogs and traitors.

His school years had done nothing to ease the antipathy. From the moment he had set foot upon the Hogwarts grounds, his infamy had overshadowed all else. The accomplishments of Slytherin had been swept aside in a tide of Gryffindor euphoria, smothered by the reverent whisper of his hallowed name in the corridors. Not a month went by when his name did not appear in _The Daily Prophet_, and the peace of his hearth had been shattered by the incessant whinging of his useless son and the increasingly frequent summons of the Dark Lord. Potter was an unceasing thorn in his side, and the notion that his machinations were unattainable without the complicity of his nemesis was an irony only a Slytherin could appreciate.

"No, no, not Potter," came the quick reply, and hands rose in a placatory gesture. "Thank Merlin. Even if it were, you'd be getting no help from him now."

"He's that grave, then?" The idea that the pubescent menace might expire beneath the bed linens of the Hogwarts infirmary filled him with perverse glee. The situation would have to be spun in the Dark Lord's favor, of course. It wouldn't do for the greatest conflict of the age to have such an anti-climactic and ignominious conclusion as murder by underling, but that could be arranged.

"That grave. So grave that Dumbledore has resorted to looking to the United States for a bezoar. So far, his efforts have come to naught."

"Excellent." He allowed himself to relax. "That Granger child, then?"

"An understandable guess, but no." A polite cough. "No, it's rather worse, I'm afraid. It's the transfer pupil."

"Transfer pupil?" he repeated blankly, and then it came to him. His features contorted in an involuntary spasm of revulsion. "Not that diseased wretch Draco has been banging on about?" His mind reeled.

"That's the one."

"But she's a defective," he insisted. "And a Muggleborn. To hear my son tell, it, she's a mangled Medusa in a wheeled chariot."

"He's not far wrong," his companion conceded. "But aesthetics and pedigree aside, she's possessed of a magic I've never seen before, and I'm telling you, if it can be harnessed, it could bring our enemies to their knees."

"I don't believe it," he insisted mulishly, and thumped his cane on the floor. "How do you know it's not simply the scrawlings of an unbalanced mind, normal magic viewed through a lunatic's lens?"

"Because it's too ordered, too precise in its arrangement to be the work of madness. There is thought in every quillstroke. Everything is placed with an almost obsessive care, as if she were aware of the power she wields. No recklessness, no hesitancy, just a methodical mélange of disciplines. It's like she's setting the pieces on a chessboard for a game only she knows how to play."

"Bollocks," he said flatly.

"No." Infinite patience. "It isn't. If she were deranged, there would be evidence in her homework, and there isn't. It's impeccable. Nor has she stood up in the middle of the Great Hall and announced she was the queen of Siam."

"I was under the impression she couldn't stand at all." When in doubt, resort to wit.

"Well, no, she can't, but that isn't the point. The point is that, however she came by it, the magic is real."

He gave an incredulous snort and sat back abruptly in his chair. He was seized with the infantile urge to grab the nearest object and hurl it at the far wall, but he wouldn't give his leering companion the satisfaction. He fisted his hands around his wand and handkerchief until his fingers ached. He would not believe this. _Could _not. It flouted every belief he had ever held, and to even entertain the notion that a child inferior by even Muggle standards held dominion over an undiscovered magic shifted the heretofore steadfast fulcrum of his world. The room gave a vertiginous lurch, and he closed his eyes against a wave of dizziness.

_It is not so, _hissed the voice of his father. _It cannot be. All magic is imparted from the blood of the pure, a right gifted to them by the Fates before they were set upon these shores to rule over all who followed. There is no magic beneath sun or sea that was not first seeded in the Pureblooded heart. No one comes unto magic save by dint of the Pure, and none of mongrel blood can breathe life into the magic of the earth and give it form and voice. It is deceit and blasphemy, and he should be killed where he sits for daring to utter it._

He thought to do just that, but it seemed too much effort to raise his arm, which lay numbly in his lap, night and marble in the torchlight.

"Even if you were right and she were mad, the possibility still exists that the magic is untainted. Think of it as unintentional castoff, or magical photosynthesis. Madness in, useful magic out."

He uttered an unintelligible croak. It was all he could manage.

_Freaks do not create magic._ The thought was a mantra inside his school, mooring him to fragile reality.

"How do you know about this?" he asked when he could trust himself to speak.

"I saw a letter she had written to one of her friends in Dumbledore's office."

"She has friends?"

"Others like her from that school. She seemed to be soliciting advice."

"I thought you said that it was a game only she knew how to play," he said shrewdly.

A shrug. "Perhaps they all know how to do it." Glib, dismissive.

He didn't need to ask to whom _they_ referred. The other mongrels, of course, and this time, the vertigo threatened to swallow him whole. "I want to see it," he demanded through clenched teeth. His palms were sticky with a sheen of feverish sweat.

"See what?"

"The letter, you slack-jawed lackwit," he snarled. "I want to see the letter."

"Ah. I'm afraid that won't be possible."

"And why bloody not?" His composure was badly shaken, and he suddenly wanted nothing more than to be at home in his study with a glass of fine port in one hand and the world firmly beneath his leather-slippered feet. If he could only find himself within the snug confines of Malfoy Manor, then everything would make sense again.

"Because I'm certain Dumbledore has owled it to its intended recipient. The Headmaster's communications are as yet exempt from Ministry scrutiny."

Lucius snorted. "And why would he care if the letter fell into Ministry hands? Even if it were proof of new magic, the peons working under Fudge's auspices would be slow to notice, if at all. That many of them can walk and breathe at the same is a feat beyond understanding."

"He thinks she can help him exonerate Severus."

Lucius hid his squawk of surprise behind a sudden cough. "Exonerate Severus?" he repeated.

The hand holding the handkerchief gripped the arm of his chair between white-knuckled fingers, and as the interminable seconds passed, he wasn't sure if the cramp massing in his chest was laughter or despair. The axis of the world trembled beneath his feet.

_Dancing bears and unicycles, that's what I'll see next. I've slipped through a crack in the world and ended up here, little Pureblood lost. The Severus I knew and recruited would sooner have roasted on a spit than accept the help of a Mudblood child. His fierce pride and his Potions-maker's hands were all he had to his name, and he guarded them both with bared fang and a murder's dispassionate eye. Have you fallen so far, old friend?_

Curdled sympathy bloomed inside his chest for a fleeting instant before being crushed by the iron grip of self-serving pragmatism. There was little room for maudlin sentimentality in a Death Eater's heart, and he had every intention of being the last man standing when the dust settled. He rose with a grimace.

"What will you do now?"

"That's none of your concern," he snapped, and tugged on his robes to smooth them. "Where is the girl?"

"In her dormitory, I suppose. Either that, or in the infirmary. She had a fainting spell in the owlery, and Pomfrey treats her like glass. Are you going to see her? Wouldn't that be rather odd, Mr. Malfoy? A preeminent Pureblood calling on a Muggleborn child?"

"I don't recall asking for your assessment. One more word, and you can forego your monthly stipend," he said sharply. Then, more softly as he stowed his handkerchief, "And we wouldn't want that, would we? Without that money, your sister's crying shame might starve."

"I told you I've never-"

"I _know._"

"Mr. Malfoy-Lucius, please…"

"Spare me your useless wheedling. It will do you no good." He inspected the tip of his wand for dust. This hovel was filthy. He offered a reassuring smile. "I shouldn't worry yet. You're still of use to me." He turned and strode toward the door.

Would he see the girl? Oh, yes, he would. He would look upon her with his own eyes and establish the truth of his informant's ravings, and if they were true, if she and her kind were the secret lodestones of powerful magic, he would find a way to harness it. It would be his ere the end, and he would be a god, in position to depose the Dark Lord and claim the throne and the diadem as his own.

And he would see Severus. For old times' sake.

A flash of silver on his boot caught his eye as he opened the door. Aluminum paper. He scraped it off with a moue of disdain and closed the door behind him.


	52. Secret Gardens and Old Addictions

Chapter Fifty-Two

The appearance of Lucius Malfoy in the Great Hall at supper was cause for fervid speculation, and whispers rippled down the lengths of the House tables, passed from anxious lip to burning ear in an endless chain of cupped hands and furtive, rounded shoulders. Younger students who had heard the legends of their elders craned to look at him until their more prudent Housemates brought them to heel with clandestine jabs of their forks beneath the table.

None was more pleased than Draco, who sat beside his father at the Slytherin table, relishing the awed, disbelieving expressions on the faces of his fellow students. Even the professors at the High Table regarded him with wary respect, though Dumbledore was pointedly ignoring the Slytherin table, and McGonagall's lips had disappeared into her craggy face.

_They remember, _he thought smugly. _Blood still speaks, and honor, and while they may claim that my father's name holds no terror for them, they still avert their eyes when he enters a room, still incline their heads in unknowing deference. Those who don't fear his magic fear his wealth, and that is just how it should be._

_ And so will they one day fear you, _murmured a voice at the base of his skull. It danced along his nape in an erotic shiver, and he closed his eyes in momentary satisfaction. How delicious.

"Much has changed since I was a pupil," his father mused, and dabbed at the corner of his mouth with a linen napkin. He was watching Hermione Granger, who was bludgeoning a crumpet with her butter knife, her face a mask of pinched concentration.

Draco reached for a crumpet of his own from the brimming basket in front of him. Seeing Granger in paroxysms of impotent indignation did wonders for the appetite. "Yes. I should think they were more selective."

"Mmm. Indeed." His father took a modest bite of braised veal and wiped his mouth again. "I would say it was because Hogwarts was governed by a man of sense and dignity, but it wasn't so. Dumbledore was in charge even then." Bite. Wipe.

Draco snorted. "Why all the madness now? Senility? I wouldn't be surprised. I've thought him potty for years." He sliced his crumpet in half and slathered it with butter.

His father scowled. "Moderation, Draco. You'll give yourself gout. Dreadful malady, that. Rumor has it that's how your grandfather died." A wry smile. "Though I wouldn't be sure of that."

Something in his father's tone brought him up short, and he froze with the crumpet hovering halfway to his mouth. It was sly and knowing, portent and promise, legacy from a rotting crypt, and he put down the crumpet and reached for his goblet of pumpkin juice instead.

"Yes, father." A dry, uncertain rasp. He took a swallow, and then another. "Did-?"

"I was bereft, of course. A son should always mourn the loss of his father." That fleeting, humorless smirk again. "Don't you agree?"

He blinked, perplexed. "Of course. Mother and I would be devastated without you." He took refuge in another sip of pumpkin juice.

"Would you?" Sardonic amusement.

Draco set his goblet on the table and pressed the soles of his feet into the floor to reassure himself that it was still solid beneath his feet. When his father had appeared in the Slytherin Common Room in a billow of black silk and glittering silver and announced that he would be staying for the foreseeable future, the room had been swept by a wave of euphoria. Here at last was the leadership for which they had been searching in the Professor's absence. The presence of an elder Malfoy meant the time for action was at hand.

He had expected, therefore, to discuss the matter of Professor Snape's imprisonment and the status of the Ministry investigation into Potter's collapse or the brilliance of his owl campaign in the face of Ministerial oppression. He had not anticipated a discourse on his father's eventual mortality and the dubious nature of his grandfather's demise while Goyle watched the baffling proceedings with whipped potatoes dangling from his chin.

"Chin, Goyle," he said absently.

Goyle grunted in surprise and reached for his napkin, which was wadded in an untidy heap beside his plate. "Right, Draco. Sorry."

Draco considered an acerbic mot juste, but let the matter drop. He was suddenly far too tired to care about Goyle and his slovenly habits and napkins smeared with grease and assorted stains he could not place. The fulcrum of his world, so long anchored in the glittering Gringotts' vaults and his father's careless arrogance had shifted with an unceremonious lurch, and he groped for a handhold with blind, clutching fingers.

_The world has a nasty habit of that of late, _said the voice at the base of his skull, and there was nothing erotic about it now. It was grating and brittle as shale in his ear. _The old ways have passed away with the tink of a falling phial, and nothing is as it should be and has been since this world became your birthright with the boarding of a train. Golden gods have feet of clay, and that which you thought immutable has become fluid as water between your fingers. The first time you saw Professor Snape, he seemed a man of iron and adamant, stronger than the walls that sheltered him and ageless as time. His rule was unshakeable, and his stolidity comforted you even as you walked in the shadows of the lion and the badger and the raven. He was your father when your father could not be, and he stood against the tide of weak-willed sanctimony that threatened to wash you away. He was your bulwark, and now he rots in Azkaban while Potter lies in state, a saint canonized before the breath has left the body._

_ Your father was the same. When you were small, still chasing your equilibrium on wobbling, unsteady legs, you looked up at him and saw Apollyon. You were convinced that the world spun at his command, and you were sure that he slew dragons with naught but his convictions and his walking stick. There was none bigger or higher or better than him, and when you met the Minister of Magic for the first time, you wondered why the people all bowed before the dolt in the lime-green bowler hat and ill-fitting robes when it was obvious that your father was the one with all the power. You knew he would live forever. Now…_

_ Bollocks, _he thought fiercely. _Nothing has changed as far as my father is concerned. Fudge still understands the lay of the land well enough if Father managed to breach Dumbledore's formidable defenses, and everyone in this room still acknowledges his superiority, whether they like it or not. They smell it the way feral dogs smell the musk from the alpha male._

_ Mmm, _said the voice. _Old habits die hard. If he is so powerful, then why isn't Professor Snape back on the dais with the rest of the teachers? Could it be that his influence no longer extends as far as it once did?_

_ It's because it's Potter. _He was seized with the urge to kick his feet and pound the table like a tantruming child. _Potter makes everything more difficult._

_ Perhaps, but why this talk of death? A Malfoy dies at the hour of his own choosing or at the hands of a traitor. Disease cannot touch him. Such deaths are for Muggles and reprobates. Why should he fear his end?_

Why, indeed? Draco took a bite of crumpet and chewed it slowly as he studied his father. Lucius' clothes were as immaculate as ever-silks and heavy wools and finely embroidered brocade-and his hair was neatly tied away from his face. His hands moved with the same measured grace they always had, and his countenance was serene as he looked at the sea of slack-jawed, gawking faces.

But there were subtle changes, too. Lines nestled at the corners of his mouth and eyes, and a thin, milky film of saliva coated his lips in spite of constant dabbing. Worry needled his gut with gleeful, icy fingers; Unsightly mouth crust was a tradition for Vincent Crabbe, not his father, who often changed underclothes twice a day so as to prevent unpleasant odor and chafing.

_And genital itch, _offered a crass voice inside his head, and he shoved it away with an irritated snort. Such maladies were not discussed in polite circles, and besides the foamy, gummy froth represented a far graver danger. If his father were being targeted by enemies, then his own position was at risk, as was his formidable inheritance, and he was certain life as a pauper would not suit him.

Visions of penury dancing in his head like rancid Christmas puddings, he asked warily, "You've not been threatened, have you, Father?"

Lucius arched one delicate eyebrow, fork poised over a piece of succulent veal. "What fool would dare?"

"Of course not," he agreed, and hid his pathetic relief in a sip from his goblet. "Then, why all this talk of death? I'm no threat, surely?"

His father's answering dismissive snort stung more than his pride would allow him to admit.

"Indeed not," Lucius assured him. "You are my son, and I have taught you well. Respect for elders and for tradition, values the majority of your schoolmates-," he scowled at a Hufflepuff third-year with a clot of spinach between his uneven front teeth, "-have forgotten." He narrowed his eyes. "Mudblood?" he asked through imperceptibly moving lips.

Draco nodded. The spinach-eating dolt was indeed a Mudblood, a fact he had unwisely broadcast within earshot of Slytherin first-years at the beginning of term. He had paid for his thoughtlessness with a tumble down the first-floor stairs and a badly broken wrist. The Slytherins had earned detentions with Professor Snape and owls to their parents from same. Insofar as he knew, the owls had never been sent. The Hufflepuff had never mentioned _his_ parents again.

"What do you expect? He's a Hufflepuff. They're all rubbish."

There was an approving guffaw from Goyle, and Draco narrowly avoided being spattered with a fine mist of spittle and breadcrumbs.

Lucius considered that. "Yes, but their bovine stolidity can be easily manipulated. Convince them of a cause's righteousness, and they'll work until they drop. Not that one, of course. Straight to the charnel house with him." He smiled in grim satisfaction.

Draco bit into another crumpet with renewed relish. "Most of them are celebrating Professor Snape's downfall," he said.

"Are they? I shouldn't wonder. No doubt the unrefined hellions consider his peculiar brand of discipline oppressive. Another consequence of Dumbledore's liberal hand, I'm afraid." He clucked ruefully. "Pity; when I was a student, the Heads of House and the Headmaster often ordered ten lashes with the knout. The more severe offenders earned twenty. In my third year, one unfortunate fool bore fifty strokes. His back was in ribbons when they carried him out."

Draco leaned forward, elbows balanced on the table. "Did you ever get whipped, Father?" he asked eagerly.

As soon as he spoke, he realized his mistake, but he was not fast enough. His father's hand darted out and fetched him a stinging backhand across the cheek. His head recoiled from the blow, and the sharp report of the slap pealed throughout the Hall like distant thunder, a flat, rolling echo that stilled the clink of cutlery and the hum of nervous chatter.

_There's no pain, _he thought in dim incredulity as he gazed through watering eyes at Goyle, who was gaping in open-mouthed amazement at the unexpected turn of events and affording him an unpleasant, tear-blurred view of chewed bread. He blinked to clear the stinging in his eyes and stared at his father, whose lip was curled in a sneer.

"Clearly, Dumbledore's permissiveness has affected you as well. Your impertinence will not be tolerated. Is that understood?" His father's eyes blazed with fury, and he tugged on the sleeve of his robes as if to emphasize his pique.

"Yes, Father," he said dully, and now the pain did come, a bright, warm flare of heat in his cheek, and he brushed the burning skin with his fingertips, the better to map his shame.

His father pulled his chair closer to the table and spread his napkin primly over his knees. "Good." He picked up his fork again. "And no, I was never disciplined. A Malfoy is no man's whipping boy. If you remember nothing else, remember that much, b-,"

The word caught in his father's throat, and all the color drained from his face. He dropped his fork with a clatter, and his mouth worked as if he were going to retch. He closed his eyes and covered his mouth with one trembling hand. The Hall, which had begun to stir again, silenced once more, and on the periphery of his vision, Draco could see two hundred Slytherin faces turned toward his father in stone-faced confusion. A first-year down the table watched the scene in riveted silence, and a scrawny finger disappeared inside a nostril with dreamy precision.

_A funereal bogey,_ he thought with lunatic clarity, and bit the inside of his cheek to stifle a bray of hysterical laughter.

The faces at the other House tables were watching, too, but there was no concern, only a perverse, morbid anticipation. Eyes gleamed at the prospect of watching a patriarch fall, and the mute throng craned its collective neck for a better view. Parvati Patil stood on the Gryffindor bench, wobbling precariously on pointed toes, and Lavender Brown hunkered beside her at the table, a frozen, lupine grin on her too-red lips, a crouching fetch come to bear away his father's soul.

_Blood or lipstick?_ he wondered with numb detachment. Only his cheek was alive now, a bloom of blood and heat in his otherwise frozen face, and he kneaded it compulsively as he gazed into his classmates' upturned faces. Colin Creevey, eyes bulging, was scrabbling frantically for his beloved camera.

_Take a picture, Creevey, and before I kill you, I'll photograph your face as the light fades from your eyes and send it to your parents on the day of the funeral. My father is not a spectacle for your amusement. _The blood surged in his temples at the thought of his father's death throes splashed across the pages of _The Daily Prophet _for the world to see.

Oh, he could well imagine it. How the dregs of society would crow to see such a prominent Pureblood come to such a sorry end, gone to death before the twinkling eyes of his most bitter nemesis and the leering faces of a thousand Hogwarts pupils. They would gather in squalid pubs and dilapidated shanties and recount the tale hunkered over plates of stew and cheap chipped beef, wiping the gravy from their chins with the coarse fabric of their sleeves and congratulating themselves on surviving their better. Drunkards, dilettantes, and droop-bosomed whores-all would point their grubby fingers at the irrefutable proof of irony, and laugh. _There went Lucius Malfoy, _they'd crow, bleary eyes alight with beery good humor, _died on the floor of Hogwarts, he did, and good riddance, too._ Then they would laugh, the high, shrill sound of celebration, and raise their tankards in derisive salute to the dearly departed.

Not that the reaction of the wealthy would be much better, he supposed. To the outside world, they would present a façade of respectable grief, and the cream of British wizardry would attend the lavish funeral, garbed in the finery of deepest mourning. They would murmur condolences into the blank, grief-scoured face of his mother and offer her a handkerchief with which to dry her perpetually weeping eyes, and they would pay due deference to him as the sole heir, but when the doors of their manses upon the hill closed behind them, more than one would caper in pernicious glee with the grave dirt still lodged in the soles of their shoes. The months following his father's death would be a flurry of teas and conferences as the Slytherin families jostled for the vacated throne, and assassination plots would dog him like restless spirits.

_Perhaps you should make sure he is dying before contemplating your grim future._

He blinked, startled from his hysterical reverie by the stark practicality of the suggestion, and looked at his father. Goyle had half-risen from his chair and was hulking over his patron in heavy-lidded consternation, one beefy hand hovering indecisively over his father's narrow back. His father sat motionless in his chair, handkerchief pressed to his mouth and his fingers convulsively clutching the delicate fabric.

"Master Malfoy?" Goyle said. "Are you choking?"

"If he were choking, you lout, he wouldn't be able to answer you," Draco snarled. Besides, he's not purple."

Goyle considered this.

No, his father was not purple, but he was not entirely there, either. His grey eyes were distant and vacant, lighthouses whose searching beacons had been abruptly extinguished, and his breathing had an unpleasant liquid rattle that prickled the hairs of his nape.

_He's not here, _he thought suddenly. _He's somewhere else, somewhere I've never been and can never go. He's retreated to the time before me, and whatever he sees in the shadows of old memory, he doesn't like it. In fact, he's appalled. It's turned him to stone, a Medusa of his own making, and he cannot escape it._

He watched, fascinated, torn between alarm and a sordid satisfaction that coiled in his belly and groin with seductive heat. His father was always the cool one, the Rock of Gibraltar who never wavered in his purpose never misstepped on his path to glory, while he, Draco, was the puling boy-child who could never do right, revered in the pitiless light of Malfoy Manor and the obsequious din of gala dinner parties, but ridiculed behind the closed doors of his father's study. No mark was high enough to earn his approbation, because Granger's were always higher, and no matter how many times he caught the Snitch on the Quidditch pitch, there would be no plaudits because Potter always caught it a second faster or one game more often, and besides, Quidditch was a barbarian's game. So to see his customarily unflappable father so thoroughly and inexplicably discomposed was as titillating as it was disconcerting.

He reached out to touch his father's wrist, and he hesitated as he drew near. What was the harm in letting him stay like that for a while, lost in the twisting, labyrinthine terrors of his mind? He could think of a thousand sins for which his father had never done penance, expiated from consequence simply because he was older. The reminder of his father's sudden slap still smarted on his cheek, insult and fire on his skin.

_Then again, it could be a test of your loyalties, a ruse to see how deeply filial fealty runs in those sainted veins. Hesitate too long, and that inheritance of which you have dreamed since the day your father took you to the family vault could slip away, bequeathed to a respectable institution such as the Buecherwelt Repository of Ancient Magicke in Berlin, with its endless stacks of magical history piled high on dusty, teetering shelves_ and _its thin-lipped, pomaded stewards gliding through the rows with blank, politely expressionless faces, moldering tomes of forbidden knowledge in their white-gloved hands. And under their silent feet the damp and secret catacombs, filled not with the bones and dust of the dead, but with power, spells that have not seen the light from sun or torch since the shaping of the world. The pages of some are sworn to be mere rumor by those who know better, and possession of them carries a sentence of death. Wizards have forfeited their lives in search of them and likewise surrendered their birthrights for the briefest of glimpses. One thousand years of legacy would fill their coffers, and the line from father to son would be broken._

He snorted. His father would no more pass Malfoy money to outside hands than he would give his body over to the leeches and grave maggots. He was too fierce, too proud of the wealth his bloodline had wrought through prudence and careful alliances over the ages. The silver and gold that filled the vault and his coin purse was his and his alone. He would cede the fortune to him even if he had become a weak-kneed ponce, and those brazen enough to steal the coins from his eyelids at the hour of his death would be cursed and hounded to the ends of the earth.

The voice _did_ have a point, however. His father may well be testing him. His childhood had been filled with moral lessons disguised as children's play, morality plays in the guise of Lords and Ladies or tag. A right choice earned him sweets and praise and the most coveted prize of all, a glimmer of pride in those stern, grey eyes. A wrong answer earned isolation and days of frosty silence.

He cleared his throat and brushed his fingers over the sleeve of his father's robes. "Father?" he said quietly. The flesh beneath his inquisitive fingers was warm and taut, baked clay, and he fought the urge to recoil.

His father gave an undignified squawk of surprise and upset his goblet, which spilled red wine on the table linen in a rich, red pool that bloomed outward in a steady, surreptitious seep.

_The virgin deflowered,_ Draco thought stupidly, and watched the stain's progress in dumb fascination as it bled into the fabric.

"Well, what are you gaping at, you idiot?" his father snarled, and for a moment Draco thought he was talking to him. His voice was high and reedy and uncharacteristically tremulous, and his eyes bulged from their sockets.

"Y-yes, sir, Mr. Malfoy," Goyle stammered, and he rose from his ponderous crouch behind the elder Malfoy to seize a napkin and blot ineffectually at the dark and ominously growing stain.

His father watched Goyle's fumblings in seething silence, his nostrils flaring. Suddenly, he snatched the sodden cloth from Goyle's hand with a hiss of disgust.

"Bloody imbecile. Any thicker, and you'd be a Squib." He threw the napkin to the floor and withdrew his wand. He pointed it at the mess with an imperious flick of one fine-boned wrist. "_Evanesco!"_

The wine disappeared in a flash of blue light, leaving pristine tablecloth in its wake, and the overturned goblet was righted by an unseen hand. His father stowed his wand and ran his palm over the cloth to smooth an errant ripple. He inspected it for signs of discoloration. Satisfied with his work, he sat back with a sniff.

"Idiot," he murmured to Goyle. "Hasn't that doddering fool Headmaster of yours seen fit to teach you any magic, or is he too busy indoctrinating you into the unquestioning worship of Potter?"

Goyle shuffled from foot to foot, flushed with embarrassment. "We..uh…," he grunted.

Lucius flapped a hand in angry dismissal. "Oh, sit down. You weren't meant for thought, I can see. Your inarticulate gruntings are giving me a headache."

Goyle sat in his place on the bench with a disconsolate flop and drew concentric circles in his cold mashed potatoes with the tip of his spoon.

"Are you feeling well, Father?" Draco ventured.

His father rounded on him with a snap of starched wool. "Why wouldn't I be?"

Fear mixed with savage vindictiveness in his reply. "Because you're flushed, and you're making a scene," he answered coolly. His stomach had turned to molten lead, and his testicles sought refuge in the hollow beneath his navel. He was in an ecstasy of terror at his own audacity. His cheek could very well earn him a matching slap.

But no second slap came, no serrated barb of malicious wit. Instead, his father merely blinked at him, thunderstruck. "A scene?" he repeated blankly, as though his only son had suddenly begun speaking Hindi. "Flushed?" He wiped his forehead with his palm and stared at the perspiration that beaded there in befuddlement.

"Quite," Draco assured him.

"Bollocks," his father protested, but there was no conviction in it.

Glee at his father's discomfiture gave way to genuine concern. His father was behaving oddly, indeed, and insanity was hereditary. If his pater familius saw fit to lose his mind in front of the Slytherin pupils, his own standing in wizarding society would be gravely imperiled.

"You don't remember slapping me?"

"Of course I remember. You were being impertinent." More forceful, and the flush on his forehead and cheeks and the vacant glaze in his eyes receded.

"You acted strangely for a moment. Like you were going to faint."

"Rubbish," his father spat contemptuously. "I was thinking. Perhaps if you employed such an invaluable stratagem in your own affairs, I would not be forced to endure so many disappointments."

The casual malice in the remark stung more than the handprint emblazoned on his cheek, and he stiffened, his shoulders swallowing the slender stem of his neck in an unconscious bid for protection.

_Bastard, _he thought savagely. "It was my idea to send the letters," he countered petulantly. He hated the childish whine that had crept into his voice, but he was powerless to stop it.

His father's aegis was a blessing, sheltering him from the disagreeable onus of being responsible for one's own welfare and the even more frightening specter of gainful employment, but for every protection it offered, it demanded recompense in kind, not in blood or coin, but in time, shaving the years from his age until he was naught but a toddler, a child to be petted and humored, but not taken seriously. Never that. His fingers curled around the table linen, and it was an effort to relax them again.

His father sniffed over the rim of his goblet. "A rare instance of good judgment managed to overcome your mother's inferior genetics," he murmured dismissively.

His fingers closed around the table linen once more, and dull heat rose in his nape. His mother's name was as old and revered as his father's, a noble house that could trace the purity of its lines to the time of the Founders and displayed its pedigree on a tapestry that spanned the length of a wall in the family's crumbling ancestral ruin. He had once traced his chubby, little boy finger over the branches of gold filament and marveled at the exotic spice of forgotten names on his tongue-Xerxes, Ptolemy, Nero, Hera, Angelique, Commodius, Phillippa-Greek names, and French, honorable and distinguished names all. Names of which he could be proud. No, his mother was no common guttersnipe, damn what his father thought.

"Mother is just as Pure as you," he snapped.

His father made no answer, only offered that smug, infuriating half-smile he had been fortunate enough to inherit, and said, "Tell me about the transfer student, Draco."

Goyle, who had taken refuge from the brewing discord in his whipped potatoes, grunted in surprise, fork fisted in one meaty hand.

For once, Draco knew precisely how he felt. His father might as well have asked him why cheese was green for all the sense the question-and indeed the whole conversation the more he thought about it-made. He stared at his father in dumbstruck incredulity.

"Stanhope? Why do you want to know about her? Diseased little Mudblood." His fingers clenched at the memory of her frail wrist bones against his palm, and he grimaced.

"She interests me."

"Merlin knows why," Draco scoffed. "No good for anything but trouble. Sits in that rolling rattletrap of hers and watches the world go by through half-lidded eyes. Hardly know she was alive except for Potions and Arithmancy." He jabbed dispiritedly at a piece of meat with the tines of his fork and pushed it to the edge of his plate. The prospect of discussing Stanhope had robbed him of his meager appetite. "I'm telling you, Father, she's a waste of breath."

"If I were interested in your assessment of her value, I'd ask you for it," his father said sharply. "However, I _did_ ask what you knew of her. Spare no detail, but keep it brief. The company is giving me a headache."

Anger coated his throat like ash, but he was too accustomed to luxury's yoke to rebel, and so he swallowed his bruised pride behind clenched teeth. "Yes, Father," he muttered, and began to talk.

While Draco was sparring with his father and losing badly, Rebecca Stanhope lay in the infirmary and watched the supine form of Harry Potter. She could not properly call it a sleeping form since he did not sleep; he wandered in the netherworld between darkness and light, in the places only God and conscience knew. The coverlet rose and fell in rhythm to his walking, and in the watery, illusive light of the moon, she could see the white crescents of his nails, neat and smooth despite his long night. Madam Pomfrey trimmed them every few days with the patience of a mortician.

Propped in her bed with her cheek resting on the back of one bony hand, she wondered what he saw in the secret gardens of his soul. Was it peaceful, or did he relive nightmares older and stouter hearts could not fathom? She had heard the tales in the Gryffindor Common Room, the stories of Dementors and the dying wails of his martyred mother that the morbid, wide-eyed first-years devoured like sweets and kettle corn before the hearth. And there was Cedric Diggory, of course, the dead-weight mannequin Potter had been clutching in lieu of the coveted Tri-Wizard trophy. That one was still fresh enough to carry the scent of obscene glee. _Someone else_, the firsties said as they hunkered on the hearth rug and cast distorted shadows on the walls, goblin children over the bones of a kill. _Not us. We live._ Maybe that was why Ron Weasley was so quick to scatter the circle whenever he saw it.

Then again, maybe his dreams were a pleasant reprieve from the waking nightmare of his life. Maybe the hinterlands of his mind allowed him to live in a better time and place, forever young and strolling with his parents through the botanical gardens in Kew or rambling through the dirt lanes of Godric's Hollow with a picnic hamper over one arm and a pretty girl on the other. There, the sun was always warm on his face and gentle on his nape, and Voldemort was a bogey in a children's tale. Perhaps he had found utopia amid the nothingness, and if that were so, then maybe he had run away as fast and as far as his dream-legs could carry him.

_Could you blame him? _her grandfather asked.

_No, I wouldn't._

She had dreamed of running away, too, of fleeing to a place where the sun never set and muscles never spasmed or atrophied. They all had, the denizens of D.A.I.M.S., hostages to whitewashed walls and broken bodies. It was Valhalla and hope, the mythical land of Better Than Here, and it was unique to the mind that conjured it. In Better than Here, the soles of her feet were tough and leathery, not fragile as tissue paper, and covered in sand. She was brown as a late summer berry there, and if the mood took her, she could spread her wings and fly, soar into the heavens until the Aegean Sea was sapphires and diamond dust against the shore.

So, no, she could hardly fault Harry if he had decided to pull up corporeal stakes and search for greener pastures. If he was lucky, he had retreated far enough not to feel the intrusive probe of the rubber tube they'd inserted into his stomach to feed him or the undignified prodding of its counterpart at the end of the digestive disassembly line.

"Harry." A singsong whisper carried on the silver wings of the moonlight.

Harry did not stir, but Mr. Dagleby, sprawled in a chair by the door, gave a honking snore and shifted into a more comfortable position, and Rebecca flopped gracelessly onto her pillow and closed her eyes. Her breathing was too fast and too loud to fool anyone more than half-awake, but she suspected the old Auror was neither, and Madam Pomfrey had long been slumped over the desk in her office, dreaming to the smells of varnish and camphor. When there were no further creaks, she opened an eye and peered cautiously at the outline in the chair.

One hand dangled over the side of the chair, and the old man's head lolled bonelessly on the wattled stem of his neck. In the shadows, his Adam's apple looked like a tumor. His Auror's hat had fallen off while he slept, and lay disconsolately at his feet, the shattered helm of a fallen warrior.

_I could tear his throat out while he slept, _she mused, and though it had been intended as an idle mental aside, she was surprised to find that the temptation to do exactly that was a heady, narcotic pull.

_Yes, you could. You could cross the room on your hands and knees, and while he slept and dreamed of tits and pints in equal measure, you could wrap your hands around the arms of the chair and rise to your knees, a mad, ravening specter of swift judgment, twisted harpy from the devil's own Hell. You could bury your teeth in his exposed throat to the jugular and taste blood in a spurting, copper freshet. His skin would taste of leather and sweat, age and too much booze, and if you were lucky, it would shred like rice paper beneath your canines. You could bite and tear and thrash until his larynx and trachea were crushed and his vocal cords glistened in the moonlight. The bastard would die gargling on his own confusion._

The world came into sharper focus, and she licked her lips. It was such a sublime fantasy, and she could envision it with exquisite clarity. She would be a crouching succubus, and she would crush his feeble bleats of protest between her jaws until bone gave way with a wet snap. She would taste fear and vengeance, and when they pried her away, she would offer them an unrepentant, cannibal's grin.

_Bullshit, _snapped her grandfather impatiently. _That old coot may be slow on the draw and an old-fashioned, condescending prick, but he'd still drop you in your tracks with a wave of his wand and yawn while he did it. Get a grip, girl, and stop letting the piss and vinegar in your veins override the sense I gave you. There will be a time and a place for reckoning, but it isn't now, and you know it._

The voice was right, of course, but that knowledge did nothing to dispel the longing that lingered in the pit of her belly and simmered at the base of her brain like eros remembered.

_Not remembered, not yet, _she reminded herself, _but yet to be. _She smiled at the thought.

When there came no further movement for nearly a minute, she opened her other eye and reached out to brush her finger over Harry's cheek. It was cool and smooth despite his prolonged stay here, and she wondered if Madam Pomfrey included a shaving Charm in her daily ministrations.

_Probably right after she squeezes that abominable nutritive paste into the stomach tube, _her grandfather offered helpfully. _Would you like a complimentary shave with your wheat puree, Mr. Potter? _It was a horrid image, and she gagged even as she recognized the urge to titter.

"What do you see, Harry?" she whispered, and brushed milky film from the corner of his mouth. "Where do you go, china doll?" The only answer was an indelicate, groaning snore from Dagleby.

_You could find out, you know, _leered an insidious voice inside her head, and she recoiled, tucking her chin to her chest and retracting her outstretched arm until it nestled at the hollow of her throat in a protective brace. There were fangs here, too, long and silver and full of poison. Beneath the sheets, her legs spasmed in painful protest.

_No, no, no, _she thought feverishly, and counted off the seconds of the spasm to the rhythm of her shaking head. _No, I won't do that. _Then, in the voice of a rebellious, terrified child, _You can't make me. It's too dangerous._

_ Too dangerous, or too tempting? _the voice asked slyly. _You know you can do it, and behind the flimsy safeguards of your conscience, you want to do it. All you have to do is say the words, murmur that infernal invocation, and you can riffle through the contents of his mind with impunity, trace his path from the stink and hush of this bed to the moment of his creation in his mother's womb. Further, if the rumors are true. All umbilici lead to Lily. All you have to do… His birthday is as the days of the week, and why not? What harm could it do to look? You might even find the answers you seek._

She closed her eyes and pressed her ear to the pillow to block the voice and the allure it carried in its seductive whisper, and wondered if the sounds of violent retching would be sufficient to rouse Dagleby. Her heart thundered in her chest, and the spasm in her leg, which had begun to fade, renewed its vise grip.

_ I will not. I will not_, she mouthed frantically, but her hands paid her no mind. They threw back the coverlet and tossed it indifferently to the floor.

_Besides, you've already done it once,_ the voice insisted gleefully. _What was that incident in the Potions classroom but a call to the Game? The world disappeared, and with a blink of your eyes, you walked within your Potions Master's walls, trod in places never meant for prying eyes. The magic is strong here; the Game can be played with the merest breath of will. All you have to do is think it, and it is within your grasp. They don't know, not even Headmaster Dumbledore. If they suspected the existence of the Game, you would be as captive as your mentor, sequestered in the Headmaster's office or a room in the bowels of the Ministry and subjected to the sadistic vagaries of Ministry Mediwizards. _

_ When you were in that squalid institution, that Game was your lifeblood, the sole ambrosia of your existence. You hungered, _lusted_ for it, and even after you foreswore its pleasures, you remembered it fondly. All of you did. How many times did you roll toward the basement in the dead of night, only to find Jackson Decklan standing at the top of the stairs, slippers over his square, pneumatic feet, staring into the blackness pooling there? Or Hattie Turkle, muttering and stuttering as she shuffled down the hall? You all came, summoned by the irresistible pull of the forbidden. You huddled there in pairs and trios_ _and let the taint of it seep into your pores even as you traded guilty looks and tried to pretend that there was nothing amiss at all about students gaping at the basement at three in the morning with fire in their bellies and rapacious, dirty, unslaked want._

_ The want has not changed, only the place. So why not indulge while you can? He is hardly in a position to protest. All your life, you have fantasized about power, absolute and unwavering, and here the opportunity lies. What greater conquest than the unguarded mind of the greatest avatar of the age? It would be painless, and with what you find, you could be the fulcrum upon which the wizarding world rested, ignored no longer, perhaps even feared._

She was hyperventilating now, her breath a warm eddy against her cheek. The voice was liquid and glottal and absolutely right, and its wheedling intimations lapped at her faltering conscience, swamp water seeping stealthily beneath its cornerstone with tenacious, loosening fingers. She hungered for power and all its trappings, pined for the day when invisibility would be of her own choosing and not a penalty for her twisted limbs. Dominion's diadem had rested on her head in a thousand unfinished dreams, and the Game offered it to her if she would but partake.

She fisted her hands around the bedsheet. She would not succumb to its lure, to the poppy and laudanum blindness of its addiction. Potter may have been a tin idol of the masses and an arrogant, self-absorbed twit, but he was also unmistakably human, a boy of flesh and bone burdened with an impossible weight, and if she capitulated and ransacked his mind for no other reason than the ability to do so, she and the Auror in the chair would be beasts of the same stripe. She would not stoop to that level.

_Oh, but you want to, don't you? _jeered the voice, and in her mind's eye, she saw a black-eyed, red-tongued imp with the devil's grin peering salaciously from behind a linden tree. _You almost did with Professor Snape._

_ But I didn't, _she countered. The bedsheets slackened in her slick-fingered grip as the corners surrendered their hold on the mattress. _And I won't._

The imp laughed and capered merrily around the withered bole of the linden tree. _Sooner or later, you will, _it told her, and cackled. _It is inevitable. Already your resistance is weakening. _

She sighed, and after a brief struggle, she sat up and swung her spindly legs over the side of the bed, her socked feet dangling just above the floor. Bitter cold burned the soles of her feet through the flimsy cotton, and she resolved to buy thicker socks the next time she went to Hogsmeade. She scrubbed her face with the back of one stiff hand and stifled a yawn. Her bones were heavy inside her skin, and her eyes were raw and gritty from too much wakefulness, but the leering voice of the imp made sleep impossible. Instead, she stared at Potter in the moonlight.

She had only intended to look, to study him for clues more prejudiced eyes had missed, but her body acted of its own volition, moving in the thrall of the imp's terrible, singsong voice. She threw out her hands to brace herself against Harry's bed and dropped to her knees. Her knees screamed in protest at the unexpected weight and pitiless scrape of the stone floor. The pain was sharp and crushing, shark's teeth and iron hands, but she did not rise. The need to know was too great, and there was no respect to stay her hand.

_Victory! _the imp shrieked inside her mind, gamboling around the linden tree in an ecstasy of triumph, but she did not hear it, nor did she pay heed to her grandfather's plaintive shout. Both were drowned out by the roar of anticipation.

She closed her eyes, bent over Harry, and sniffed the hollow of his neck, a predator savoring the jungly odor of fear in the seconds before the killing bite. He smelled of starch and wool and the bland, pencil-shaving tang of medicinal soap, and fine hairs tickled her nose. Freshly scrubbed skin and a hint of bitter almond and the lingering, stale reek of those whom death has marked, but not yet claimed.

She sniffed lower still, over the thin wool of his hospital robes and the parasitic hump of the stomach tube. There were more smells here-the dry-pasta scent of rubber tubing, the coppery stink of old blood, the cool piquancy of adhesive. She lingered here, lips parted in a vampiric half-smile. The tips of her hair brushed his stomach in a furtive caress.

There was a grotesque eroticism in the pose, an unconscious sensuality that would have given an outside observer pause had there been anyone to see, but the old Auror slept on, and Madam Pomfrey, whose ears were usually sharp enough to catch the faintest of cries or sniffles, did not emerge from her office. There was only Rebecca, and she was lost to everything but the gnawing fire in her blood.

_Play the Game, _insisted the imp, and her hand rose dreamily into the air and began to scribble names and numbers onto the nothingness. The pitch behind her closed eyes began to recede, replaced by the undulating tendrils of time and possibility.

_That's right, _crooned the imp. _Yours for the taking. Just reach out your hand and say the words. _Her frantically scribbling finger swung in a wild, uncontrolled arc in the air above Harry's bed.

Her lips pulled back from her teeth to mouth the words. _Listen, my children, and you shall hear a tale of woe and pain and fear._ Her breath came in ragged gasps, and the red and green threads filled her vision. With her other hand, she reached out and plucked the life thread of Harry James Potter from the sea of undulating strands.

For such a short thread, its weight was staggering, and it seethed with despair and impotent rage and flailing, furious bitterness. Her fingertips and the palm of her hand sizzled and crackled with magical current, and it reverberated through her unseen forearm and into her shoulder, rattling her teeth and stuttering her heartbeat inside her chest. She tasted ozone in her mouth, and it was a conscious effort of will to control her tongue.

_The power, _she thought stupidly. _How can there be blood in his veins with all of this power?_

And then the images flooded in.

_Snape, dark and brooding and greasy at the front of the room. Footfalls reticent and heavy as stone. Mud and sulphur in his mouth. Chilly glass between rapidly numbing fingers. Ginger-red and unkempt auburn. Friendship and loyalty in the leonine tower. Horse's teeth and ruddy, mustached faces. Porcine shadows that blotted out the sun. Hippogriffs and hope. Fear and the heft of a sword in his hand. Stars and moons and half-moon spectacles, and a cupboard full of scuttling spiders under the stairs._

She was crying now, silent, panting huffs of expelled air, mouth working and head thrown back, eyes wide and vacant. Her spine arched at an impossible angle, and her abused knees wept blood onto the greedy stone.

_I don't want to be here. I _shouldn't _be here. It's not right. Oh, God, how can he stand it? Too much! Too heavy for such young bones. He's smothering. Can't they see? Wearing away like a worry stone too often used. They'll grind him to nothing if they don't stop, but even if they did, he wouldn't. Vengeance is all he has to call his own._

The thread pulled her inexorably backward, past the dark and mildewed cupboard, past a bulldog with drooping jowls and an owner to match.

_Grandpa, help me get out, _she pleaded. _There is no anchor here._

Her grandfather's voice sounded from across the void, but it was feeble and helpless. The magic was too strong, and she hurtled on.

_Holidays spent in a cabbage house and feline feet on his lap. Figs and hand-me-downs. Face rubbed in the dirt with the weight of the world on his back. Christmas with barren chimneys and sacks full of coal. Tottering steps in a spotless kitchen. Green suns and Irish eyes that did not smile. The comfort of a pram in God's Hollow. Going to the market, Harr-_

It was overbalance that did what discipline could not. Her knees, no longer able to support her, gave out, and she toppled sideways with an ungainly flop. One outstretched hand struck the night table between her and Harry's bed, and the glass of water Pomfrey had placed there before retiring fell with the shrill tinkle of shattering glass. Her wand rolled off the table and onto the floor, and she lunged for it without thinking.

"Hngh!" cried Dagleby as he awoke with a start. "_Lumos!"_

The sudden brightness hurt her eyes, and she closed them instinctively as she lay, panting, between the beds. Water from the shattered glass soaked her nightclothes, and her stunned fingers scrabbled frantically for her wand.

_Oh, Jesus, Jesus, what do I do? Tell me I didn't. It was a nightmare. It had to be. _But even as she seized the possibility, she knew it for a lie. Her arm still thrummed with residual magic, and her skull throbbed with stolen memories. Harry's melancholy and unfocused rage still clung to her skin in a sticky sheen. Her free hand scrubbed the hem of her nightgown.

_I'm sorry, Harry._

_ Bet he's heard that a lot, _her grandfather muttered.

The beam of light drew closer, and Dagleby squinted woozily at her. "What'r you dng, girl?" he asked.

Before she could answer, Madam Pomfrey appeared in the doorway to her office, wand upraised. "What in blazes in going on in here?" she demanded. Then she spotted Dagleby looming over her. "Dagleby! What are you doing? Harassing a student?" She advanced on him, wand pointed at his gobsmacked face. "Should have known that the Professor wouldn't be enough."

Dagleby flinched and took two hasty steps back. "Madam! I'll have you know I did nothing of the sort. I merely heard a noise and came to investigate," he protested indignantly.

Pomfrey snorted. "Are you all right, Stanhope?"

"Yes, ma'am. I-_was following Harry-_had a nightmare and fell out of bed, is all."

"There! You see?" Dagleby said. "Preying on a student, indeed."

Pomfrey pointed her wand at Rebecca. "_Wingardium leviosa!"_

Rebecca floated back into bed.

"Now then," Pomfrey said briskly as she pulled the sheets over Rebecca and tucked them beneath her chin. "What was this nightmare?"

Rebecca blinked at her. "It was…about D.A.I.M.S.," she said finally. Close enough to the truth.

"Is that all?" Shrewd.

_No. I was really ransacking Potter's mind, and it got a bit out of hand. So sorry. _"Yes, ma'am. It was a bad place."

"I see."

Pomfrey turned to smooth Potter's bedclothes and stopped short at their disarray. She turned to Stanhope again, opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again. She straightened the coverlet and absently smoothed Harry's untidy hair.

"Wake up soon, won't you, Harry?" she whispered fondly.

After a few more moments' fussing, she shambled back into her office with a last baleful look at Dagleby. The old Auror settled into his chair and resumed his heavy-eyed vigil, and Rebecca curled beneath the sheets and scoured the roof of her mouth with her tongue to rid it of the taste of bile. Her hands fisted in the pillow as though its solidity could anchor her to the world.

_That's twice, _yammered a voice inside her head. _If it happens again, you have to tell the Headmaster. You can't control this. Not here. Magic flows too freely._

_ You won't tell, _jeered the imp indolently. _You'll need it ere the end. You knew that a long time ago. That's why you wrote the letter to Jackson. You knew it would come to that, and the truth is, you hope it does, because the old addictions die hard and sometimes not at all._

"Only if I have to," she slurred in sleepy defiance.

"Hungh?" grunted Dagleby.

"Nothin'," she said thickly.

The only answer was a resounding snore.


	53. Sowing the Seeds of Bitterest Discontent

Alastor Moody sat in his office and watched the morning fog roll over the moors and blanket the windows in a shifting gauze that blotted out the ashen dawn only to reveal it once more through the fragmented, bleary lens of the windowpane. The vibrant colors of spring and summer had faded, leached of their vitality by the encroaching breath of winter. What little grass remained was brown and brittle, and the surface of the lake was dull and listless, cinders and lead. Soon, the ice would form, and by December, the boisterous, heedless children within these walls would be skating over its surface, shouting and laughing and oblivious to the danger lurking so patiently beneath their feet.

"Gormless little sods," he croaked. "Never think a moment."

_Neither did you at that age. _

He grunted in grudging concession of the point and unscrewed the cap of his hip flask with stiff, frozen fingers. No, he hadn't. Age and the loss of his leg and half his face had brought his wisdom, and it had been a bitter price to pay. But he knew now, and he saw what they, in their youthful ignorance, would not. Could not. His vigilance saw the tiny, hairline fractures that runnelled through the seemingly pristine ice over which they so glibly skated, confident in the belief that grace would never falter and gravity would never win. He saw what lay beneath.

And that was why he was sitting here in his office at half past seven in the morning, freezing his leathery arse off and ignoring the weeping throb of the November cold in his joints and waiting for the Stanhope child to cross his threshold with her clanking jalopy and her too-bright eyes. He was an Auror in a teacher's flesh, and it was his duty to be vigilant for those too reckless to know better.

_She might not come. Hasn't been a young one yet who doesn't like to lie abed. _

Oh, she would come. Of that he had no doubt. For all her affectations of misanthropy, she was a Gryffindor in the marrow, and no less than the Headmaster had bid her take up the charge. He had appealed to her vanity, to her need to prove her valor, and like stronger, wilier souls before her, she had answered the call. The children in the House of Lions were not permitted to shirk the duty laid before them, no matter the terror in their hearts, and she would walk into the valley of shadows because there was no choice.

_There seldom is. That's the way of life, and of Albus Dumbledore. He smiles and twinkles and cajoles, and it's all so heroic and noble and grand, so damn _sensible_, that before reason can stop you, you've hobbled pell-mell into the killing chute with nary a backward glance. You were a Ravenclaw and a seasoned Auror when you fell into his thrall. You knew each trick of the forked tongue, each strategem of deceivers. You smelled the lies like copper on their lips, and despite all your experience and inveterate wariness, you found yourself in his pretty snare and agreeing that a Death Eater deserved to live. Little wonder, then, that a child should fall into his trap._

He took a long sip of scotch and rolled it on his tongue, savoring the sour-sweet bitterness of it and the heady bloom of heat in his chest, the kindling ambrosia of Prometheus. It always came back to Snape, and he often wondered how and when such a sniveling waste of skin had become the fulcrum upon which lives and future successes hinged. Snape had brought him out of his warm bed to sit in a chair and knead absently at a calf that had rotted to dust in the soil of Essex.

Severus Snape was a dangerous man, and if the child knew nothing else, she deserved to know that. When he had shaken hands with an angel to spare the devil from his due, he had known precisely what he was doing, but she was going in with eyes wide shut, and though he had never been a Gryffindor, it smacked of unfairness and a cavalier disregard by Albus for the consequences.

_That's hardly new. _Prosaic, wry. _For twenty years, he has been so focused on the end of destroying the Dark Lord that he cares not for the means by which it is done. Or if he does, he tells himself that with one life, he is buying one hundred more, that by keeping secrets, he is sparing untold anguish. It is only after, when the blood has been spilled and the body lies cold and unmoving beneath its eternal blanket of earth, that he counts the cost and finds it too much to bear. By then, it is far too late, and the only atonement to be had is in the lines in his face and the emptiness you can find in those blue eyes if you look closely enough. He has done it to everyone who walks beneath his banner, including Harry Potter, his golden child. You shouldn't be surprised._

"And look where it's landed young Potter," he muttered to the shifting gloom of the room. "Stretched out in an infirmary cot while Clothos weaves his winding sheet." Another contemplative swig of scotch.

_Nor was he the only one. Dumbledore's well-intended machinations have done a great many of his followers a fat lot of good. Take Potter's parents, for example. They believed him without question, and now they are martyrs remembered by fewer every year and ghosts who haunt the child they left behind. Or the Prewetts. Two sons came home in boxes draped with Merlin's crest, and though the sister who would one day become Molly Weasley has learned to smile again, she has never entirely forgotten them. They live on in her constantly wringing hands and the shrill voice that cannot stop hectoring and the cotton umbilici with which she binds her sons to her. She looks at her husband and children and sees, not men, but funeral pyres and Orders of Merlin, First Class in velvet-lined boxes. _

Simeon and Gideon Prewett. There was a pair he hadn't pondered in a while. Years, maybe. The boxes they'd been brought home in had been closed for good reason, and even as a veteran Auror, he'd been shaken by the carnage. The younger Aurors on the scene had vomited discreetly into the privet hedge. His gorge had remained steady, but later that night in the dingy confines of the Boar's Head Tavern, he had quaffed a fifth of scotch, and had taken a week of baths with lye soap to get the reek of Dark magic and the gassy sweetness of exposed entrails out of his robes and his nostrils.

_Even when it seems that we've strayed far afield, the point is close at hand, after all, because Severus Snape and his coat of turning colors was in the thick of the stink. He and Lucius Malfoy both, sons of Slytherin, as diametrically opposed as darkness and light, but united in their malice and bottomless ambition. Brothers in greed, they would gladly have torn the viscera from their enemies if it moved them one step closer to their coveted glory._

_Oh, there was no proof that they were involved, no bloody handprint, no scrap of clothing left behind as they fled. The blowflies that crawled over the unseeing eyes of the dead did not cast indictments against them in their strident, buzzing tongue. Officially, no one was ever brought before the Wizengamot on charges, and the Prewett file gathers dust in the Ministry vaults, passed over even by the Aurors assigned to murders everyone and time has forgotten._

_But officiality is not sacrosanct, and rumors are longer-lived than truth by miles and centuries. The scuttlebutt in the pubs and houses of ill-repute put faces to the specters that had spirited them away, and they were hook-nosed and sallow-skinned and fair as ivory with a crown of white fire. The Ministry bigwigs ignored the whispered, soaked as they were in rye and gin and other assorted spirits of the most terrestrial stripe, but those who had slogged through the trenches and lived through the horrors the bureaucrats proposed from the safety of their lofty parapets listened. Most of them frequented the taverns to slake their thirst and guard against nightmares, after all, and those with nothing to lose but their lives see the clearest of all._

_Odd that you should place so much stock in an institution that has spent the last ten years overwriting all the good you've done with tales of your paranoia and the exploits of "Mad Eye," who once was Alastor Moody in the eyes of the Fates, _sneered a dour, rusty voice inside his head. _They slosh ale over the splintered lips of their tankards, and between sips, they assay to one another that you had always been mad, and that lunacy drew you to the bosom of Aurory as a moth to a flame. They grunt and they nod, and then the bolder and the drunker among them assert that your mind was not all you lost when that Curse struck home. They guffaw and raise their tankards, and with unsteady voices, they toast poor Moody, who lost two of his three legs in one fell swoop._

He grunted. Well, they could think what they liked on that score. The Curse had taken most of a leg and a chunk of his nose, but his bollocks and prick were still his own, even if they were as dusty and ignored as the dossiers in the Ministry's vaults. He intended it keep it that way, too; since the unfortunate Bum Mishap of 1974, wherein a young Auror had divested himself of his right buttock in his haste to draw on an oncoming suspect, he had given up stowing his wand in a pocket or belt loop. However barmy the legends made him to be, he was not a fool.

Besides, the perniciousness of the grapevine that wended its way through the bars and back alleys of Knockturn Alley and its surrounding environs did not preclude its occasionally utility, and he had never been above using any tool at his disposal to gather information. More than one Death Eater had come to that realization a scant second too late.

The eddies of gossip in the low places of wizarding society had identified Snape as a murderer, and he had believed it because he had wanted to, and because he had known the boy would be nothing but trouble from the moment he had lain eyes on that sullen, sneering face. There had been cunning in his face, an awful, shifting awareness that had reminded him of the flitting shadows that moved within the murky depths of a stagnant palm, elusive and mocking and infuriatingly impudent. His face had never been so expressive since; experience had since taught him painful lessons in the need for discretion, but that first glimpse had told him enough, and their encounter in the Ministry interrogation room a year later had done nothing to change it.

He had first seen Severus staring insolently up at him from the pages of a dossier put together by Aurors investigating anonymous allegations of Death Eater partisanship. His picture had been one among many-two dozen, actually, all of whom would turn out to _be_ Death Eaters-but even in that motley band of hellions, delinquents, sods, bastards, and ne'er-do-wells, he had stood out.

He had been a shade past eighteen in the photograph, and though his cheeks had borne the rough shadow of stubble and the shoulders had been thin slats inside his robes, much of his face would remain unchanged over the next nineteen years. His hair had been a greasy, lank mat, and his nose had already seen better days, a crooked, hatchet-blade protrusion from the center of his thin, sallow face.

And the eyes, of course. Black and glittering and seething with a contemptuous truculence that radiated from the photograph in a palpable wave that made his sinuses burn. _I am better than you, _his eyes had said as they scowled and narrowed and followed the movement of his hands over his desk with the aloof interest of a cat tracking an imprudent and bothersome mouse. _I am better and smarter than you, and I can prove it. You are of no consequence, and I have no need of you or your self-righteous law. _

According to the file, he was the only son of Pureblooded Slytherins. He was a child of privilege, or so the file had said, but the underfed boy in the photograph belied the words written with laborious care beneath it. The collar of his robes had been frayed and threadbare, and the cuffs protruding from the sleeves of his too-big robes had been yellowed with age, too few launderings, or both. If the Snape family cup had runneth over, then the son had clearly not been enjoying the wealth of his father's house. He had been bedraggled and unkempt, and there had been no reason for his arrogance.

Yet there it had been, potent and undeniable, and he had stared at the smirking, dour visage in disgusted disbelief, torn between the irrational impulse to hurl the picture across the room and an equally childish desire to lock eyes with the likeness until it blinked or averted its gaze. The boy in the picture had seemed to know it, too, because those thin lips had curled in a feline sneer that had made the blood burn in his veins and the knobbled ball of his thumb press into the glossy paper until the young face scowled and the bony shoulder pulled away with a furious flounce. Pale, thin fingers had wiped fastidiously at the greasy smear left on the shoulder of his robes.

"Weren't so haughty in my interrogation room, were you, you arrogant little shit?" he murmured with rough satisfaction, and allowed himself another swallow of scotch. "No, you screamed like all the rest when your bones popped, and I smelled the piss on your robes when you left."

Snape had crossed the threshold of his interrogation room two years after the dossier with his picture had crossed his desk, delivered there by Albus Dumbledore himself. Albus had been somber and silent, but Snape had been just as arrogant as ever despite the fact that he was being cast into the belly of the beast. Inscrutable black eyes had stared down that long, crooked nose, and the sanctimonious bastard had even had the temerity to cross his arms over his chest as though he were already the merciless schoolmaster he would become. Well, he had cured him of that soon enough, and never mind that he had promised Albus that no coercion would be used.

He hadn't lied to his old friend, exactly. When he'd bid his old friend farewell, he'd had every intention of honoring his word, but an hour into the interview, he hadn't been able to stomach the stony smugness any longer, and it had given him immense satisfaction to see pompous surety replaced by fear and pain, if only for an instant when the Stinging Hex had found its mark on that bony sternum.

_He never thought I'd do it; that's why he was so surprised. Curses were not for the good or the just. They were gifts to the serpents and slithering creatures of the earth from the hand of Dionysus. They were forbidden to Apollo's children, beautiful shards of obsidian that poisoned the bearer if wielded too swiftly, too eagerly, or too often, and even if they hadn't been, it was not for a mere mortal and a beaten-down Auror to break a promise to the demigod, Albus Dumbledore. He was surprised as much by my hubris as he was by the hex itself._

Not that he'd stuck with the schoolboy hexes for long. Temptation was not the sole province of the wicked, and as with any vice, the first step had proven his undoing. The look of surprise and furtive unease had been too sweet, manna on his parched and ravenous tongue, and he had happily gorged himself. A second hex had followed the first, and still more after that, each darker and sharper than the one before. White to grey to black, and he had felt no shame.

On the contrary, it had thrilled him to watch his quarry writhe and twist and grit his teeth in a futile attempt to ignore the pain of Constrictus or Tortium, flecks of spittle glistening in the cracked corners of his mouth and eyes rolling in their sockets. He was an insect to be crushed and nothing more, a rat he would delight in shaking to pieces, and when he at last resorted to Cruciatus, that most revered of Eden's tainted apples, it had been euphoric.

It had gone on for interminable hours, and eventually, he had wearied of even Cruciatus. It was too remote, too sterile, and he had longed for more intimate contact, to feel the bones and tendons break and tear beneath his hands. He had wanted to see the moment that Severus Snape broke, the instant that his sullen defiance guttered and died.

_But you never did. His pride was too fierce, too hot, and though he shrieked when the bones of his fingers snapped, he did not beg, and his story never wavered. He simply screamed behind his teeth and followed your hobbling, deliberate circuit around his chair. He reeked of sweat and bile and piss, but his eyes were as clear and bright as ever, and they blazed with contempt and stiff-necked audacity even as the next knuckle shattered. He never broke, and you've never forgiven him for it._

No, he hadn't, and he never would. His loathing would linger long after he was naught but bone in a forlorn London churchyard and fading memory in the whiskey-rotted minds of old Aurors. It would seep into the soil in which he was buried and ensure that nothing but thorns ever grew upon his tomb.

His reverie was interrupted by the ratcheting whirr of turning gears and clicking magnets, and a moment later, Rebecca Stanhope peered into the room, cautious and hesitant, fingers clutched around the stem of her joystick and nostrils flared. A glance at the hourglass behind him told him that she was right on time.

"There's a bloody first," he growled, and his magical eye fixed on her. "A student on time."

She offered him a wan smile. "Professor Snape made it quite clear that tardiness would not be tolerated."

He stiffened at the mention of Snape's name, but he only said. "I wager he did. Well, come in, girl. If you're waiting for biscuits and tea, you'll be sorely disappointed."

She shook herself. "Yes, sir." She rolled into the room, parked in front of his desk, and folded her hands in her lap.

He grunted and pointed his wand at the door, and it swung silently shut. "You know why you're here, do you?"

She pursed her lips and flexed her emaciated fingers. "Yes, sir. The Headmaster told me it was to receive remedial tutelage in the Charms Professor Flitwick assigned me in Hogsmeade."

"Aye," he said, and nothing else.

They stared at one another across the desk. He raised his flask to his lips, and she brushed a stray hair from her forehead. He stretched out his wooden leg with the creak of leather binding straps, and she blinked in polite expectancy and studied the bewildering array of Dark Arts detectors arranged on the shelves behind his head. Her eyes drifted from one to another, and they occasionally lingered over an object he sensed was of particular interest.

_You like them, do you, girl? I imagine you would. You all do. In the beginning, when you're wide-eyed and wet behind the ears, the Sneakoscopes and Foe Glasses are the epitome of glamour, the totems by which our world is safeguarded, but by the time you get to be my age, you realize they're as hollow as Cornelius Fudge's head. The Dark will always be darker than the Light can banish, and it's a victory if you can just keep your head above water._

_Mm. Fat lot of good your Foe Glasses and Sneakoscopes did when Barty Crouch, Jr. came calling._

He shifted irritably in his seat. The ten months he'd spent imprisoned in his own trunk and smelling varnish and mothballs and his own stink while Potter was led toward a rendezvous with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and Cedric Diggory was led to a date with his last breath were not his finest hour, and he preferred not to think of how easily he'd been fooled and overpowered.

He took a consoling swig from his flask and screwed the cap into place with slow, deliberate turns of his fingers. "Do you like what you see, Stanhope?" he asked casually.

She straightened and tore her gaze from the shelves. "They're intriguing, sir. I've never seen most of them."

"All rubbish if you don't know how to use them. You've got to have constant vigilance. Wizards get complacent, relying on gadgets like those. Got to use your instincts."

"Yes, sir." Polite and a trifle quizzical.

"How are yours?"

"My what, sir?"

He rolled his eyes. "Your instincts, girl," he snapped impatiently.

It was four breaths before she answered. He watched her frail chest rise and fall beneath the bundle of her robes. "I like to watch things, sir." She shrugged.

_I'll just bet, and with that mangled body of yours, unwary fools pay you no mind. _"That's not what I asked."

It was almost nine breaths this time, and he could see the cogs grinding in her head as she tried and discarded responses, a fickle child trying on clothes before an attic mirror. He was too fascinated to be properly insulted, and though his leathery, grizzled countenance betrayed no emotion, he was wryly amused. Given time and practice, her inherent talent for evasion and stoic stonewalling could prove formidable, indeed, and he had little doubt that it had already overmatched dullards like Dawlish and Umbridge, but he could still see the seams and crevices of her mask.

_Albus, you old fool, _he thought in incredulous, bitter amazement. _This cub of yours has sharp teeth and sharper claws and bollocks in fistfuls, but she's still a cub for all of that. She wouldn't last five minutes with the likes of Lucius Malfoy or that lunatic, Bellatrix Lestrange. They'd toy with her for a while, allow her to think she'd a chance at the game, but when they wearied of her, it would be over quickly, and when the dust settled and the screams faded, there would be nothing left but a red smear and tattered Gryffindor robes._

Finally, she said, "I think they've served me well, sir."

"Do you, now?"

She nodded. "Yes, sir. They're not foolproof. Seamus told me that last year, Headmaster Dumbledore spent most of the term convinced that a Death Eater was you."

Moody bristled at the subtle insouciance in her voice and the memory of dust in his nose and the humiliating sting of hairs ruthlessly plucked from his thin scalp as he lay in his own trunk. "Find it funny, do you?" he snapped. "Has it occurred to you, girl, that if an experienced Auror and the greatest wizard of the age can be overthrown and deceived, you've got scarce little chance? You're in deep waters, indeed, and they are not gentle. There are sharks aplenty, and enemies without names, and you'll not see them when they come for you."

She merely regarded him with that baleful, gaunt face, fingers curled around the arms of her chair.

"What do your instincts tell you about Snape?" he demanded suddenly.

She blinked. "What do you mean, sir?"

"You know what I mean."

Her shoulders stiffened. "No, sir, I don't. Headmaster Dumbledore said you were going to teach me the Disillusionment Charm and a complex Silencing Charm for mobile objects."

"Aye, and I will, but first, you're going to tell me about Snape. If you don't, there's the door." He pointed at his office door with one gnarled finger.

Her lips thinned, and she straightened still further in her chair. Her eyes were narrowed slits, and her clawed fingers dug into the worn vinyl of her armrests. She was a cornered cat, hunched and searching for escape, claws extended and scrabbling in the soft soil of the snaring hedgerow.

Come on, girl. I've you either way. Tell me, and you risk damaging his scant virtue more. Hold your tongue, and your quest, fool's errand that it is, dies in this room. Your only choice is to choose, and I can wait all day. Impatience is for the young and the stupid, and I am neither.

"I suspect he's not terribly popular at tea parties, and if the pupils of Hogwarts spontaneously combusted in a firestorm of brainless hedonism, he'd shed nary a tear."

"Any idiot could see that," he scoffed. "The man puts on his hatred alongside his underpants. What do they tell you about who he is, _what _he is?"

"He is my teacher," she answered simply.

"Haven't you ever wondered why a man of his skill teaches when he so obviously loathes it?"

A brusque shrug. "He has his reasons, sir. Maybe he's a masochist."

"Dumbledore didn't tell you, did he?"

Her brow furrowed. Tell me what, sir?"

"About him. About what he did before he was a teacher?"

"No, sir, and it's none of my business. Everyone is entitled to their secrets."

_But you want to know. I see in your face, in the way your nostrils flare and your eyes dance. You've caught the sweet, narcotic scent of mystery, and there'll be no getting rid of it until your curiosity has been satisfied. Blackbeard's wife and the cat both fell prey to their desire for the forbidden, and it killed them in the end, but there was ecstasy in the terror of discovery and delight in the slinking, tallow-spined pursuit of the mouse. You cannot resist; you thrive on it, in fact, and I've belled you without a fight._

There was another emotion, too, a fleeting flicker of guilt, as though she had glimpsed something unchaste, a blur of entwined bodies seen through the crack in a carelessly closed door.

"He's not what you think he is." It was kind, pitying.

"Neither is anyone else, sir."

He sat back, satisfied. That was enough for now. She was still defiant, but the seeds had been sown, and when she tired of the maddening itch in her blood and on her scalp like the defiling prickle of lice, she would ask. When she did, he would tell her. Everything. Every bloody, sordid detail.

"Take out your wand, Miss Stanhope," he ordered, and she did.


End file.
